The cool thing about Ignite Seattle, beyond the crazy fun format (5 mins, 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide), is how positive and supportive the vibe is.  Everyone talks about cool things they’ve seen and heard, and there’s a buzz of learning and doing that’s superior to most conferences.  It’s geekish, for sure, but it also surprisingly cross-discipline. There were talks about parenting, libraries, biology, medicine, raising chickens and more.

Perhaps part of the magic is that it’s just one intense night – the fact that’s an evening thing and there’s always a bar at the venue perhaps changes who comes and why. Kudos to @Brady and @BryanZug and the all the folks that volunteered to help out.

Last night I was lucky and got to a talk on how to give an ignite talk, and if the video makes it online I’ll post.

In the meantime here’s what I learned last night (from memory – forgot my notebook):

• Creativity is fueled by contact with weak social links – you need points of contact that are not your primary circle to stimulate you  (Shelly Farnham)
• Assuming your users have Alzheimer is a hack for better design thinking (Roy Leban)
• There are many people with Lego-addiction and Hillel is one of them (Hillel Cooperman)
• I learned about clipping (drop vowels) and thesauri (vocabulary wins) for twitter (Jason Preston)
• If you think you’re competent, you probably aren’t  (Ron Burk)
• Native Americans/?Micronesians  had cool map technology (@kbeegle)
• All good marriages are creative partnerships (Jen Zug)