I recently mentioned to someone that Ignite  NM was coming up soon and they asked “What’s Ignite?” The simple answer is it’s a conference for people with short attention spans, and it’s about anything that someone is passionate about. The way it works is people pitch ideas of things they’d like to talk about, and the community decides which ones sound the most interesting. The catch is each presentation is five minutes long, with 20 slides, 15 seconds each.

As fun as the Ignite presentations are where it really gets interesting is the Reverse Ignites. In a Reverse Ignite a volunteer from the audience agrees to talk about a random set of slides that they have never seen before. People get amazingly creative.

If this sounds like fun you can find more information at ignite-nm.com. And if you’d like to try your hand at a presentation you’ve got until July 29th to get a pitch in.

The conference is held Sept 11th at the Albuquerque Convention Center, part of the Albuquerque Tech Fiesta.