Monday, June 23, 2025
We hope you're as excited about Search Central Live Deep Dive APAC as we are! With just a few weeks to go, we wanted to share an exciting experiment that we're planning to run at the event, and introduce our community speakers. Let's start with the experiment.
Poster sessions
You're probably already familiar with the concept of lightning talks: one person gives a short presentation to a room of people using a limited number of slides. We have run lightning talks at multiple Search Central Live events in the past. This quick-paced talk is generally liked by the attendees of previous events, but it's also very limiting for us and sometimes also for the prospective speakers. Some talk pitches wouldn't work well as lightning talks, but would work fantastic as small group presentations with discussions. We were thinking a lot about how to give a venue for these kinds of pitches to shine: poster sessions!
What is a poster session?
Poster sessions are more common in the academic world; it's a vital component of scientific conferences, offering a unique and interactive way for scientists to present their work, engage with their peers, and receive feedback. The name, poster session, is quite telling: instead of a presentation with a bunch of slides, the presenter creates one or more posters with the content they're presenting. And yes, we mean large physical papers which we print for the speakers based on the design they submit. During the poster session itself, attendees walk through the poster hall, and the presenter chats with their peers who stop by about the content they're presenting — 1:1 or 1:few — for about 40 minutes.
Why poster sessions?
Poster sessions are a fantastic way to share information on niche topics. These are often more complicated and require discussion rather than a stage presentation. They allow for direct, personalized, and longer engagement with a wide range of attendees, with much more opportunity for networking. In essence, a poster session is a vibrant marketplace of ideas, fostering direct communication, and even collaboration within the community.
The real stars of the event
Compared to our usual handful of community speakers at our events, at SCL Deep Dive APAC 2025 we will have 31. You read that right: thirty-one community speakers. Some of them will deliver lightning talks, some of them poster sessions, and we are super excited to introduce them here:
We're super excited to see their presentations! Only a few more weeks to go!