Hi everyone,

For the next meetup, I want to try something a little different. Instead of having a single speaker, we're going to try an evening of lightning talks. If you've never heard of lightning talks, they're nothing more than 5-10 minutes talks about anything you want to talk about. We'll try to arrange between 6 and 10 speakers, and we'll just do the talks one after another.

What I need from you is your talk proposals! If you've got something you want to talk about, and if it has to do with software or computers, then we'd love for you to speak. Do you have a library or language you think we should know about? Do you want to convince everyone to use (or not use!) pair programming? Are you trying to spread the word about Dvorak keyboards? These are just a few ideas of things that would make great topics.

If you've never given a public talk before, this is a great way to get your feet wet without committing to a full 60 minute slot. If you're interested in speaking at conferences, lightning talks are also a great way to get started with that. Above all, though, you'll be teaching the rest of us something important, learning a lot yourself, and having fun...I promise!

All I need from you now are proposals, just a paragraph or two describing the talk you want to give. If we get enough submissions, then I'll try to select a good spread of topics and speakers. If we really get a lot of submissions, then we can think about having another evening of lightning talks.

If your talk is selected, I'll arrange to get your slides from you ahead of time, and I'll queue them all up on the night of the presentations (the date is still TBD.)

So send me your submissions at [address removed], tell your friends to send theirs, and let's see what everyone has to say!