I gave my presentation on "making your first open-source contribution" in Tog yesterday evening and I think it went down well; I enjoyed delivering the talk and received positive comments about it afterwards -- although I do need to speak louder. I'm enjoying lightning talks! Now, what to speak about next... :)

The slides are available on Slideshare (or PDF). I also gave a hand-out to give people a chance to check out the links afterwards.

On another note I think an evening of lightning talks was generally well received, and there is some motivation to run another similar event in 2 months. I'd love to have this be a regular thing. We need to be more strict on time-keeping though; surprisingly it seems people tend to feel bad for not speaking long enough, so they start just talking about random stuff or opening web links of cool things to show off... and interesting or not it feels like it's dragging on, particularly when one knows there's 3 or 4 more talks to go after.

I also got feedback from first time visitors that starting late "because people will be late anyway" makes it very sucky for people who don't know anyone yet, and also less likely that there'll be time to stick around after the talks to chat with the speakers and other attendees. I think we should start right on time next time (and to be fair, the 2 or 3 people who arrived between 7:00pm (announced time) and 7:30pm (actual starting time) were members... Not worth waiting for!!). It'd be nice to start on time and then encourage people to stay with drinks and cookies, or otherwise we need to find a social butterfly that is good at integrating people. :-)

Writing this down now, so that I can remember it in 2 months. Any other comments on the evening from people who were there, or general suggestions and tips on organising lightning talks?

(Irish Hackerspaces Week isn't over yet! Check out our other events.)