The week before APSA, I went to Foo Camp, a sort of hackers-meets-Obama-officials-meets-business-types-meets-weird-and-interesting-musicians event organized by O’Reilly media. One of the various interesting things for non-geeks was the “Ignite”:http://ignite.oreilly.com/ style of presentation, which several of those gathered presented. Ignite gives you precisely (and only) five minutes to speak – your Powerpoint/Keynote or similar presentation has 20 slides that advance inexorably every fifteen seconds. What’s nice about it is that it forces people to cut to the chase. Presenters can bodge the format a bit (e.g. by having three identical slides in succession for a graph or idea that they want to dwell on for more than 15 seconds), but they have no choice but to finish before their five minutes are up. It left me wondering why APSA and other conferences don’t adopt a similar style (if, as is increasingly the case, conference facilities offer projectors in most or all of their rooms). I don’t think I have ever seen a conference presentation at APSA that couldn’t have been improved by being cut down to five minutes with inexorable advance, requirement for advance planning over what you actually want to say and so on. Indeed, I don’t think I have ever _given_ a presentation that couldn’t have been so improved. This would of course be accompanied by a properly functioning website that professors actually uploaded their papers to in advance, so that people could actually read ’em.
I can imagine that there would be howls of outrage from presenting professors who have grown all too accustomed to presuming upon the patience of their audience – but I can’t imagine but that it would be Pareto improving for them too (even if they felt that the world was being denied the full subtlety of their wisdom, they could feel pleased that the tedious and prolix monologues of their co-presenters were being cut down for size. And obviously, this would create actual space for debate of the papers rather than exchange of set positions. Maybe the political theorists (who are the most likely to gripe given that they do need to present subtle ideas; but also in my experience the worst presenters of their own work) could be cut a break, and given ten minutes instead of five. Any flaws with this that I’m not seeing?