Hear + Now: WomEng Lightning Talks

Goals

Speakers become more comfortable and confident with public speaking.
Grow the women in engineering community internally and outside your organization.

One person from WomEng volunteers to organize the event. This person works with the events team to reserve a space and the IT team to setup any equipment needed.
There are five talks total: 1-2 engineers from Block and 3-4 guest speakers.
Ten minutes is allocated per lightning talk with two minutes for transitions.
Speakers send their slides to the organizer, who compiles them into one slide deck for the tech talk.

When planning a lightning talk, several logistics need to be confirmed, including:

The date and time of the event;
The location;
The maximum number of attendees;
- We suggest ⅓ of attendees are from your organization and ⅔ are from external organizations.
- Plan on having only half of the people who RSVP'd show up to the event. So, you can allow up to twice the number of maximum attendees to RSVP.
The theme of the event;
- We suggest you start off with the theme "Lessons Learned." This is broad enough to include a wide-range of talks.
And, a plan for finding speakers.
- We ask our WomEng community to reach out to their networks. We also have a speaker form (created through Google Forms), which we send out via social media to find speakers.

Once all logistics are confirmed, create an invite. At Block, we use Splash. Here's an example of a previous invitation.

Note: If you're interested in speaking at or attending a future Block Hear and Now event, we'd love to hear from you.