Yesterday, bunch of my friends at work attended the Ignite Chennai event organized by ThoughtWorks. All the 5 of us were audience, not speakers. The event started at 6.30 PM, that's a 30 minute delay from the planned time of 6 PM. Now that's not a good sign. The presentation hall was filled with nearly 40 people (that include 20 presenters). I expected at least 200.Rule of Ignite Chennai: A presenter can present only for five minutes and use a maximum of 20 slides for presentation.
Govindarajan Sundarajan kicked off the event by giving an introduction about the event. Then first presenter took the show, followed by the other presenters. Few notable points:
- Out of the 20 presenters, only 2-3 were impressive.
- out of 20 presenters, 4 were from ThoughtWorks.
- Though only 20 slides were allowed, many presenters used more than 20.
- There was a presentation on Google and its suite of products (Blog, GMail, Groups, Reader, Ad Sense etc). I felt really disappointed on this presentation. Why would someone present about Google and its products in Ignite Chennai.
- A presentation ONLY on Java Structs, Hibernate, iBatis and a whole set of J2EE suite of products. Man, I was really on the edge of anger. I felt that the organizers should have filtered these core-technical topics out of Ignite Chennai. What would a non-techie understand? In 5 minutes how can a person cover the entire J2EE concepts? Disappointed.
- A presentation on building schools in India. This presentation looked more like an advertising / marketing thingy. Disappointment again.
- A UI designer presented a topic on E-Learning. First four minutes, he spent on doing a physical activity that was totally useless, all of us in the last row ended up laughing for the whole of 5th minute. In the last minute he rushed up his slides and that was yet another thumbs down presentation.
- There were two presentations on ice-breakers. 50% disappointment on both.
- All the other presentations were very OK types except for a presentation made by a lady on "How to handle fake products", that was really awesome!
I had actually set very high expectation for the event. May be that's the problem. I expected at least 2-3 totally out-of-the-box ideas and many innovative ideas. But, after listening to the 2.5 hours of event, I was totally disappointed by the content. I felt that the number of entries received for the event was less. Marketing should have been much better, that definitely would have attracted quality contents and presenters. Since Ignite Chennai is happening for the first time in Chennai, we really can't pull negative points out of it. Overall, Ignite Chennai was OK. Appreciate the initiative by ThoughtWorks for conducting Ignite Chennai. Expecting a revamped version of Ignite Chennai from ThoughtWorks next year. All the best in advance.
4 comments:
I do reflect the same views...
@ Senthil,
Hmmmm. :)
What is this ignite chennai concept?
Of course i can google it out.. but too lazy :P
@ Lazy Vishy :),
Ignite Chennai is an event where any one can come and present on any topic under the sun. Rules are: only 20 slides are allowed and only 5 minutes for your presentation.
This is actually a tweaked version of Japan's 20-20 da. In Ignite Chennai, its made as 20-5 :)
You tweak this little further and conduct in IIM-B, it will be a hit.
Few folks here in (your-ex-company), are planning for a similar type of event with lot of rule changes. All plans ready. Will roll out soon.
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