Was talking to a friend recently. He told me about a very interesting format for running plenary style conferences. It's called 'Pecha Kucha'. In essence, it operates by restricting a plenary presentation to 20 slides with each slide being displayed for a maximum of 20 seconds. (20 x 20).
More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecha_Kucha
The 20x20 format of Pecha Kucha is now also being adopted in the business world, with some company internal business presentations being run in a strict 6 minutes 40 seconds, with all discussion and questions held to the end of the presentation. This is primarily a device to help timebox presentations, force presenters to be more focused in their message, allow them to flow uninterrupted, and ultimately to avoid the "death by powerpoint" syndrome, of sitting through long and often tedious PowerPoint presentations.
I reckon this is a format worth experimenting with at the next 'London Area Communicators Group' meetup in April.
Incidentally, photos from the last seven meetups are available here.
Tags: pecha+kucha melcrum communicatorsnetwork
