Lately, I wanted to organize an internal session to share knowledge about a topic(WebRTC) and gain insight from people’s thought. Mainly, I wanted to share the technology behind the conference applications we use every day while practicing public speaking. Even though WebRTC still excites me after the years, I just didn’t want to bore my colleagues with details for 45 minutes. On the contrary, I thought just 5 minutes should be enough to take people’s attention and make them curious about the topic.

I decided to organize an internal Lightning Talk session. A lightning talk is an informal, short presentation where anyone can speak according to a theme, if there is one. In a lightning talk, one can practice public speaking while feeling safe with colleagues she spoke every day, and one can excite her colleagues with a brand-new topic, idea or techniques.

As far as I can tell, knowledge sharing is still a bottleneck for some companies I’ve worked at. A monthly lightning talk session could relieve the pain on the bottleneck.

My colleague Wolfram wanted to push it forward and suggested me to make it company-wide event. By that way, not only IT, but every employee in the company, will have chance to make a statement and practice public speaking.

To make a point within a couple minutes, presenter must know the topic and the message she wants to convey. It is a valuable challenge for all presenters to make the topic understandable for people with different backgrounds.