Introduce, Speak quickly, to the point, sit down.

I gave my very first Pecha Kucha talk last night.  It was a blast. You get to work with only 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide.  

Why give such a short presentation?

It's 6m 40seconds long.  It won't bore people to death for an hour if it sucks. Yes, your presentation probably bores the shit out of people if it's over 30min. Go fix it!  

Also, it allows for more people to speak in a short amount of time so there's a lot of variety as far as presentation content goes for a group of people to watch instead a long presentation over 1 topic. 

20 slides?

Sounds easy, but it's not.

At first you'll think that it's easy to fill 20 slides.  Then you start to realize 20 slides might be too much when you trim down your content.

20 seconds per slide?

Sounds like a short amount of time, but it's not. It seems long while you practice, but then it's non-existant while you're actually giving the presentation. 

When you do your first run through after you have all your slides, you'll think to yourself that you need more content or words, but I can assure you -- you don't.  If you can picture in your mind that you're having a conversation that flows with the audience, you'll be alright.  Since there's not enough time for people to ask questions until the end, you can flow from slide to slide.

Topic?

You can talk about whatever you want.  To hit a greater crowd talk about something broad. The more specific you get, the less your crowd will understand. You pick. It's your 6min 40seconds of fame.

Video of the Pecha Kucha night will be up as well as the slides from everyone's presentations at: http://www.refreshjacksonville.org/

Another contender in the RubyOnRails CMS arena

I was asked to do a quick review of a new CMS called Ansuz. It's available on Github and is being developed currently. A few quick things for those interested in using it:

* It's under development as we speak, so there's a lack of documentation, almost non-existant

* If you're looking for something to get up and running ASAP, you might want to look at RadiantCMS 

How easy is it to install?

Somewhat easy.  It's not as easy as RadiantCMS, but the README on Github did a pretty good job in getting my install up and running in about 5-10min.

Everyone want's their own functionality.. so what about creating my own Plugin for Ansuz?
Luckily, the Ansuz guy's wanted to lower the barrier of entry and used Desert by the Pivotal guys to help with the plugin architecture.  

How hard is it to implement the Plugin that I build?

The act of building a plugin is easier than other CMS's, but implementing it into Ansuz might be another problem.  Since I haven't given quite enough time to actually implementing one, I'll leave this to be discovered, soon.  

Does it have a cool interface like the other CMS packages out there?

No.  Ansuz's admin interface so far is very crude.  You can't knock it just yet, since it's still being developed.  So if you're a designer, help these guys out and jump in there!  The functionality of the admin interface doesn't seem too bad though.  Is it easy to understand? Sorta-kinda. It seems like there might be "too much" going on in the Admin interface, again, this could be dealt with after the majority of the CMS is done.

How's the quality of the code-base if my company were to use it and build on it?

Even though I would love for a company to use my open-sourced code, if it were still under development, I wouldn't feel right suggesting it to be used in production for a critical app just yet.

I'll continue my review and writing some documentation for Ansuz, so if you have any questions leave a comment and I'll see if I can't help you! 

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update

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Ansuz uses Engines instead of Desert for their plugins.