[EuroPython] "Themes" instead of tracks - please feedback?

[Benedikt Hegner]

Hi all,


> Hi there
>
> After todays EP2007 meeting on #europython Laura, Michael and I
> discussed the
> track situation for the upcoming conference.
> The following dilemmas were identified:
>
> - last year had lots of great talks - but maybe too many talks and no
> room for
> socializing and discussing - the idea was to have an Open Space to  
> mend this
> - we are still missing track chairs for the web track and need co- 
> chair
> help with the language/lib track
> - if we want to have proposals for education/methodology/social
> and separate tracks for science and refereed papers then we would have
> again the risk of too many tracks and the difficulty of handling talks
> that land "in between" tracks
> - PyCon does not have tracks - rather rooms that proposed talks were
> grouped into sessions
> (very much what happened at last years EuroPython)
>
> So - after some discussions we cooked up the following idea:
>
> - we do not announce tracks, instead we choose and describe a  
> selection of
> "themes" that we describe in the Call for Proposal
> ("themes" could be mixes of science/language-lib/web framworks/
> games/education/methodology)
>
> - the "themes" would have the purpose of inspiring and guiding  
> submissions
> and would make selection of proposals easier than having no  
> guideline at all
The change indicates officially that the breakup into  
"themes"/"tracks" isn't too strict. I like that :)

To sum up how I understand it: in the registration we give a list of  
topics/themes and the speaker can select the closest one to his talk.  
This would help us to assign those talks to people reviewing them.  
After finding out about "topic clusters" we group them into sessions  
with (hopefully) meaningful names.

And completely independent from that above one can say if one wants  
to have it refereed or not, right?

> - we can then form a "program group" where people interested in  
> helping out
> with reviewing talks join in - sharing the "chairing", groups sessions
> based on accepted
> proposals and work out who hosts the different
> sessions when the conference is underway
Do we still want to give contacts separated by "themes" (the ones in  
the call for papers) on the webpage?

+1 to the idea by bea and mwh

Ciao,
Benedikt