Last night I attended my first GeekUp event. It was very interesting, but due to the fact the meetings are always on a Wednesday which is my busiest night of the week I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it to any more. However we shall see.
There were two short presentations in a 20:20 style because, as the Pecha Kucha website says:
…as we all know, give a mike to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to Pecha Kucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.
So it was quite impressive to see two worthy contenders for the speed-presenting crown giving interesting talks on OpenStreetMap (see the website here) and eye tracking. Both were educational, and I’m sure 6 minutes and 20 seconds never seemed so short to the guys speaking.
The crowd seemed to enjoy it, too, especially as they were encouraged to heckle if the speakers went over the allotted time of 20 seconds per slide. And heckle they did, assisted by beer. I left early, but not before my good friend Steve managed to get chatting to two young ladies (yes, they were there for the geek event and not just random passers-by) so who knows what happened to him last night. He’s playing coy about the whole affair, so I guess we’ll never know…