[Chennaipy] Talks for the next meetup

[Shrayas rajagopal]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 9:00 AM, Vijay Kumar <vijaykumar at bravegnu.org> wrote:
> I am not sure of this. If we want to get down to the details, let's do it
> as a workshop. For me, "full length" talks are half cooked. Here are
> the problems:
>
>   1. With a large audience, not everybody might be interested in the topic.
>   2. Not everybody might have the required background to understand the
>      talk.
>   3. Not all speakers are proficient, and not many can keep the audience
>      attentive throughout.

You put forth some rather irrefutable points :)

But my argument here is that this could be used as an opportunity to
learn the exact things that you are talking about. A meetup, as
opposed to a conference is a much smaller affair and might just be the
right stage and environment for people to experiment with this sort of
talking. Instead of expecting everyone to inherently be good at
conveying a message or catching attention of all the people, some of
us who are more experienced than the others could help them out in
this.

>   4. In general, the attention span of the human brain is only 10-15 min.
>      So anything after that is just a waste of time and energy.

I disagree with this.I think if the topic is (made) interesting
enough, most people cling on to it and be interested. The meetup is a
python meetup and there is a lot to learn from every domain where
python is used. Even though I don't use it for scientific programming
or for embedded systems (for eg.), I find the concepts put forth very
interesting from a language point of view itself.

> With workshops most of these problems are negated.
>
>   1. Only people with interested and the required background attend.
>   2. Since workshop will be hands-on and interactive, speaker proficiency
>      will be secondary.
>   3. The attention span problem will not hit workshops, since it is going
>      be hands-on and interactive.

Not everything needs to / can be a workshop. Because of the following reasons:

1. The person speaking at a workshop is expected to know quite a good
sum about that topic and that might not actually be the case
everytime. The person might have just used it for a while but be
proficient in those parts alone
2. Workshops are meant for teaching, the person might not want to
teach it (because of say, point #1) but just share the idea and see
how people think about it.
3. I think it takes a LOT more practice to do a workshop as opposed to
a 10 minute talk. The focus is more on you during the workshop than
during the talk and that requires a lot more self confidence.

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One talk per meetup would be a good balance in my opinion. We could
either start with this talk or end with this. It can also be done on
public opinion - What do people want as a deep dive session (maybe a
poll in the previous meetup by show of hands) and see who is ready to
do this.

We can also provide mentoring to people who think that they are
nervous or not able to put out their points while engaging the
audience. This is completely time dependent. I understand that this
can take up a LOT of our time but I hope that other people would
volunteer in this effort too. Its just an idea i'm winging out to see
if it catches fire.

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@others?