I got this idea talking to a guy about a New Year’s Eve party he was at with a martial arts club. They did a thing where everyone taught one quick lesson about something. Sounded very THATCampy to me, so I’d like to suggest giving it a whirl here.

So, maybe one session where everyone there aims to teach, in five to ten minutes, something about DH, kinda like Dork Shorts, but less about projects and more about knowledge and skills-sharing (depending on how many people show up, might have to enforce a time limit!). So, you might teach the group about a particular tool you like (any Prof- or Grad Hackers here?), or about some general knowledge or technique you use — a habit for managing RSS or Twitter feeds. Or maybe a quick lesson about some detailed technology (what is Object Oriented programming? or what does a MySQL database look like and do, anyway?). I think it could be a fun way for people to share something that they’ve learned recently and present it to others — always a good way to reinforce newly acquired knowledge!

We’d have to be versatile in the session depending on how many people (if any!) are interested, and we could riff along based on what people want to hear more about, depending on time. In that way, I guess it’d be a kind of THATCamp within a THATCamp. I imagine very short lessons that would span a lot of knowledge and interest–very quickly presented–that would be a nice brain-dump and exposure of who’s interested in what kinds of things, and who has skills that other people are looking to learn more about.

Whaddya think?