Conference Talk Distiller

conference-talk-distiller

The talk-recap skill. Most conference talks have rich ideas buried in narrative; the user doesn't have time to re-watch but wants the substance retained.

When to use

• After watching a recorded talk.
• After attending a live talk where the user took rough notes.
• When the conference-cfp-and-recap-watch digest flags a talk worth distilling.

When NOT to use

• Full conference recap → conference-cfp-and-recap-watch.
• Multiple talks at once → run this skill per talk.

Distillation framework

For each talk, identify:

1. The thesis — 1-2 sentences. What is the speaker really arguing?
2. The 3 things that matter for our program — compliance-relevant takeaways.
3. The mental-model shift (if any) — does this change how we think about something?
4. Speaker worth tracking — does this person belong in voices.csv?
5. What I'd ask in Q&A — articulating questions sharpens thinking.

Output structure

# Talk Distillation — {speaker} — {title} ({conference})

## Thesis
{1-2 sentences}

## 3 things that matter for our program
1. ...

## Mental-model shift (if any)
{...}

## Speaker
- Worth adding to voices.csv? {yes/no + reason}
- Other surfaces (Substack, GitHub, etc.)

## What I'd ask in Q&A
- ...

## Related vault notes
- [[wikilinks]]

As the final step, write the distillation via vault-writer.write_insight to vault/insights/YYYY-MM-DD-talk-{slug}.md — the whole point is retaining the substance past the conversation.

Composes with

• conference-cfp-and-recap-watch — surfaces talks worth distilling.
• voices-roster-curator — when a speaker becomes a voice worth tracking.
• vault-querier — find related vault context.
• vault-writer.write_insight — persists the distillation (final step).

Acceptance test

SKILL.md describes the 5-element framework. Live exercise deferred.