A lightning talk is a fast paced 5 minute talk on the topic of your choosing. If you’d like to do a lightning talk please add your name, topic to this page. You can do more than one if you want, but if the lots fill up (there are 30 of them) you might have to choose which one you want to do.

Mark Jason Dominus has a nice page about lightning talks, which includes this summary of why you might want to do one:

Maybe you've never given a talk before, and you'd like to start small. For a Lightning Talk, you don't need to make slides, and if you do decide to make slides, you only need to make three.

Maybe you're nervous and you're afraid you'll mess up. It's a lot easier to plan and deliver a five minute talk than it is to deliver a long talk. And if you do mess up, at least the painful part will be over quickly.

Maybe you don't have much to say. Maybe you just want to ask a question, or invite people to help you with your project, or boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up thirty minutes.

Maybe you have a lot of things to say, and you're already going to give a long talk on one of them, and you don't want to hog the spotlight. There's nothing wrong with giving several Lightning Talks. Hey, they're only five minutes.