ROSCon Community Events
Hi Everyone,
ROSCon starts a week from tomorrow and I just updated the ROSCon website to include information about the 
lightning talks and 
birds of a feather sessions at ROSCon 2022 in Kyoto. You can find everything you need to know in the community section of the ROSCon website. I wanted to re-post that information here for visibility.
Lightning Talks
Back by popular demand: in person lightning talks! We will have a lightning talk session during both full ROSCon days! The window for submitting your talks is going to be incredibly short so I wanted to give everyone enough time to prepare. Here is the wording from the website:
On the first full day of ROSCon, October 20th, through the morning coffee break (~11:10 AM Kyoto Time) we will provide a form to submit your name, talk title, and optionally slides or a video for your lightning talk. Slides are not required, and there are no particular format requirements other than a six slide maximum. If you choose to use slides or video they must work on the coordinator’s laptop. We recommend you use common portable formats (e.g. PDFs, Google Slides, or PowerPoint). Videos are also acceptable but they must be less than two minutes, and preferably less than ninety seconds. We cannot guarantee the audio from your video will work correctly. Videos not hosted on Vimeo or Youtube must be less than 100MB in size. Given our time constraints, we would recommend against trying to do a live demo. If your lightning talk violates any of the constraints listed above it will be removed from the lottery.
Lightning talks will be reviewed and then selected via a lottery. Approximately after lunch on the first day of ROSCon the selected lightning talks will be announced on the ROSCon website and via e-mail.
Finally, and we can not stress this enough, KEEP👏IT👏SHORT👏. You will have exactly two minutes and a maximum of six slides. We recommend the following format:
- Who you are
- What you’re working on
- Your cool thing / idea / project
- Where to find more information (we suggest using a link shortener / QR code)
- Make it fun!
- KEEP IT SHORT
Birds of a Feather (BoF) Sessions
This year we’re going to try having semi-official Birds of a Feather sessions where like minded individuals can meetup and chat about their particular interests. I have allocated four spaces (named Noetic, Humble, Rolling, and Foxy) in the conference center for people to meetup and chat. Feel free to use the BoF areas to organize outings, conduct in-person working group meetings, demo robots, or find like minded individuals. There really are no hard and fast rules, go nuts. If @tylerweaver wants to organize a a ROS meme BoF that’s alright by me!
On the ROSCon website there is a Google Sheet where you can sign up to hold a birds of a feather session. Feel free to use ROS Discourse to create a BoF discussion group (I suggest that you link your Discourse post to your cell on the BoF spreadsheet). Please tag your post with roscon2022bof. If this goes well I’ll set up a category for ROSCon 2023.
One last piece of advice, if you are going to run a BoF, I would recommend wearing something easy to spot, like a funky hat or shirt, or that you make a sign. The conference center is quite large, and people can be quite shy, so it helps to make yourself easy to find.
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