A Lightning Talk is a short presentation at a conference or similar forum. Unlike other presentations, Lightning Talks only takes a few minutes, and there are usually different in a short span of time by different speakers. History and format
Lightning talks may originate at the Python Conference in 1997, where they simply called Short talks. The term "Lightning talk" was first advertised by Mark Jason Dominus for a similar session at the YAPC 19100 Conference in June 2000, and gradually spread to other technical conferences.
The format differs by event. Most conferences indicate a 30 to 90 minute talk time for Lightning talks and arrange different speakers in succession during the session.
The length of the lightning talk is usually between 1 and 10 minutes with a usual maximum of 5 minutes. To enable quick switching between speakers, sheets are usually discouraged or only one computer is used that shows all the presentations of all speakers. Also see
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