[Conferences-discuss] academic recognition and meeting people

[David Ascher]

> But mostly it is the ability to meet
> folks that is the draw of conferences. OSCON is probably not a good place
> for that.

In my experience, OSCON is fine from that POV except if you're, like me,
split between several tracks, booth duty, etc.  But back before I was
working for ActiveState and involved in Mozilla, OSCON was a fine
socializing event, and a great place to meet people I had heard of who
for whatever reason hadn't gone to IPC's (e.g. they were Perl people
=).  It's also a good place to make bridges with people who might not be
Python fans but overlap in another dimension (application domain,
country of origin, whatnot).

If more Python folks go to OSCON, it doesn't take much to make it a
successful social event.  A focal point and some beer usually does it. 
IIRC, the first time there was a Python track (the next-to-last Monterey
OSCON, I think) was a lot of fun even from "just" the Python
perspective.

I've also gotten more job offers at OSCON than at IPC =).  Also, OSCON
is trying to be family friendly, with a daycare option which worked well
for us last year.  Another third-order parameter which we can talk about
at length.

--david