This year the SCB tried out a new presentation format, modeled off speed dating. In the first half of the session, each presenter got 3 minutes to present their work, and in the second half, everyone milled around chatting with those presenters whose work intrigued them.

Personally, I felt that it was a brilliant format. Three minutes really is enough to convey the bottom line, everyone got their questions in, and lots of real back and forth dialogue seemed to be going on. Certainly, business cards and so forth were flying about, and the noise level of the room was a happy din.

One particularly odd moment came when Guillermo Andres Ospina, rather than trying to cram everything about his project into three minutes in a second language, simply presented all the slides from his full-length talk on “Biodiversity conservation under armed conflict in Colombia” quickly, in silence, one after another. I must say, it felt very futuristic, as if we were all absorbing all the words and images flashing on the screen with wiser, more powerful brains.

The speed presentation idea was cooked up by four people, including bow-tied conservation gadfly Kent Redford, who told me the idea owed its birth to the concept of the remote control. One other co-inventor, Nick Salafsky, introduced his talk by explaining that the three minute time limit appealed to him because he felt his topic was so dull. Actually, I thought his topic was pretty interesting, and I just might write my next post on it.