[Inpycon] Necessity of foreign delegates. Was Re: Notes from InPyCon planning meeting of local Pune Team

[Dhananjay Nene]

On Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 10:27 PM, Sreekanth S Rameshaiah
<sree at mahiti.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 19 February 2011 18:30, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 19 2011, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
>>
>> > On Sat, 2011-02-19 at 11:34 +0530, Navin Kabra wrote:
>> >> 3. Is a foreign speaker really necessary? We spend a lot of money, and
>> >> maybe
>> >> they don't have the star power that we think they have. Opinion was
>> >> divided
>> >> on this topic.
>> >
>> > not really necessary unless the person is already in India.
>>
>> I disagree. Details in another thread (Navin's mail which I forwarded to
>> the list)
>>
> Good to do if cost is shared through a grant as in last year.
> -1 if we have to generate the entire cost.
> - sree
>

Since I am new to broader discussions about pycon india, I took some
point to ponder on the topic. I am not too sure how useful a foreign
delegate is. Here's a quick summary.

a. It is unclear if seasoned pythonista's decision to attend will be
influenced by the existence of a foreign delegate
b. Part of the foreign delegate's fees are paid for by Pycon India
whereas the local speakers don't have to, is a dualism that is hard to
explain. Of course foreign delegates paying for themselves (or fully
paid for by PSF should be fine).
c. Anyways it seems we rely on the foreign delegate to provide an
overall enthusiasm building keynote rather than some hardcore python
elucidation. So, we don't seem to be wanting to go for some advanced
python skills that we would otherwise find it hard to get from others
in India. At the same time there are perhaps some topics that the
foreign delegate could comment upon which are not otherwise not easily
understood through at least the python user mailing lists and websites
(as an eg. perhaps some insights into pypy VM)
d. The opportunity cost of the expenditure. At 1L, we cold imagine
sponsoring anywhere between 5-10 teams to work on a python summer of
code during vacations in India (this is a new idea that came to my
mind as I was thinking through the topic). From an expenditure review
perspective (how many miles does a rupee go to promote python), I have
a feeling that such an expenditure could be better suited to
supporting the growth of python in India.

Again, I am new to this area, so I may not understand all the dynamics
of how important it is to have a foreign delegate to rope in the local
delegates. But this is my 2c (or 2paise).

Dhananjay