Yes, that would be really helpful and prevent people from visiting sessions which are more general like they thought, where the main focus is on a point which don't interest them etc.

I would have kind of liked this, yes. There were a number of sessions where I wasn't interested in the details but wanted to know what was generally going on.

Great Idea. I love lightning talks, they force the speakers to concentrate their talk to just the most important part, without boring everyone but a few. This speedplugging thing sounds even better. We should definitely try that. Maybe at the next FOSDEM or in Barcelona?

They did this at CHI in 2006, and it was really helpful and successful. Each presenter for the day had 30 seconds, I believe, and they all had to have sent their slides to the session coordinator beforehand so that he could stitch them all together.

I found that it really altered my conference planning; interesting session abstracts were replaced by interesting speakers as what made my final decisions about what to attend (in part because, with CHI, you can always read the papers instead).

That sounds like a great idea. I recently attended the VMWare forum in my area and I really would have appreciated something like what you are talking about.

Good thinking!

Now that you mention it, I think the lightning talks at the summit would have more successful if there had been (1) a dedicated timeslot no competing with other sessions and (2) clearer scheduling for their existence [maybe I missed it, but I didn't know we were doing lightning talks until the week of the summit.]

I'm a bit wary of a couple things:

* Not sure if having ultra-short talks offers a whole lot of value above an agenda with _good_ abstracts for each full talk.

* Could be a lot of cumulative time spent rehashing (prehashing?) things that will be covered during the day. I think that, for me, _most_ of the summit could be grouped into "definitely attending", "not interested", or "interested, but have a conflict". Short talks for those wouldn't be useful to me.

But I think short talks in some format is definitely something we should do more of!

Semi-related note: a common request was for recording video of the talks... If we did that and standardized on having each presenter give a ~30 second overview at the top of their talk, some of your idea could be accomplished without requiring everyone to sit in a big room for every talk. Presenters could even record these ahead of time, althoguh I don't know how well that would work.

The barcamp I went to last summer did this, and I thought it was quite useful (not least because I think my talk would have had far fewer attendees if I hadn't been able to pitch it.) It also gives you the opportunity to know the faces of speakers, so that if you're conflicted between two presentations, you can track down the other presenter later with less pain.

This is actually a great idea. It's a BarCamp-esque idea, and it helps a captive audience with their decision tree. Of course, there are some things that are just irreconcilably cross-booked (you and I were booked against each other at the summit this year :-\), but when you have a choice, hearing an elevator pitch from someone about their session does influence what you might want to go to.