Lightning talks are fast paced, short presentations often sprinkled with humor and intrigue. The popular 5-minute talks present topics that are interesting to C++ programmers and are open to speakers at all experience levels.

If you’ve never seen one before checkout some of our previous lightning talks on our YouTube channel. They cover a single topic, start with the good stuff, and end making a point. Anyone can do one, but be sure to practice because 5 minutes goes by incredibly fast. If there’s one technique you wish everyone knew, one little known fact that should be well known, one tool that makes your life easier every day, or a collection of little things that you can fit into 5 minutes, you can propose a lighting talk, and you should.

Anyone can submit a talk, you don’t need to be a conference speaker (or even a registered attendee). We are looking for talks from experienced speakers, but also new speakers and students. To submit a talk, just email open-content@cppcon.org and tell us what you want to talk about and a little bit about yourself (one sentence is fine). Even if you don’t plan to submit, plan to attend, it’s sure to be fun!

Just like last year, CppCon will offer Open Content sessions in the early morning, over lunch, and in the evening.

Open Content is just that, open! Attendees and regular program speakers alike can propose sessions on anything that interests them. These might feature a single facilitator leading a room through an exercise, activity or demo, a panel of 3-5 people taking questions from the room, a “hackathon” on a specific project, or an open conversation among the whole room. The projector is available for slides or public note taking.

Open Content is designed for flexibility so that a “Birds of a Feather” talk may be proposed even after the conference has begun. A speaker who gets a lot of post-talk questions may agree to host a Q&A session in the Open Content time. An attendee inspired by a session may host a session to explore a topic further or start on a group implementation of something.

To propose a session, simply email open-content@cppcon.org and tell us the title, description, and speaker(s)/moderators(s). If you have time constraints such as “after a specific session” or “not on the same day as a specific session” let us know in the email.

These sessions will be open in another way too – Open Content does not require conference registration. That’s right, everyone who is in the area is welcome to come and join us for all the early morning/evening/lunch sessions, including proposing or leading a session. This is part of our goal to be an inclusive conference for the entire C++ community.

For now, please email your submissions as soon as you can so that our planning work can get underway. See you in Bellevue!