[Inpycon] Venue Finalization {was} PyCon 2010 - Let's get started

[Noufal Ibrahim]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <lawgon at au-kbc.org> wrote:
[..]
> have you checked what proportion of the active membership of bangpypers is
> *in* Bangalore? The traffic in Chennaipy mailing list is not all that much
> because most of the members anyway post to bangpypers as it is an older and
> more established list and most of us feel that there is no point in duplicate
> posts except for Chennai specific matters. And the same goes for Hyderabad
> also. Anyway if it is a conference on the lines of what Noufal proposes (which
> sounds eminently sensible to me) the venue is irrelevant as serious people are
> going to attend regardless of where it is held. If it attracts them, that is.
>
> so does the Indian Python community have enough people to provide real 'meat'
> for such a conference - or is this something for the future?

I think it does. We watered it down a little too much last time IMHO
and need to fix that. I think if 50-60% of the talks are advanced and
if we get one or two people from abroad who can liven it up, we can
hold a much better conference this time. A separate newbie track would
be nice too to get that out of the way.

> secondly is this 'meat' applications using python - or on python itself?

I fail to see the difference. Anything related to the language.
Applications written in Python and the language core are both
necessary to keep the language and community going so both will be
welcome.

> I think we also need to analyse the participation in the previous conference,
> where the serious people were from, what was their area of expertise, level of
> presentation. (we can ignore the newbies and the newbie oriented tutorials
> which anyway took place in a separate hall away from the main conference)

That's a valid point. I did do *some* homework and my overall feeling
(although I don't have numbers to substantiate this) is that the
conference didn't really cater to the serious programmer crowd. There
were also many people who were sub standard presenters (language and
preparation wise) which detracted from the quality of the conf. We
didnt filter out proposals properly (no one had time so I did it
myself and got the list reviewed by Baiju and a few others).

I personally didn't find any talks that really challenged me but I
didn't attend most of them since I was running around with details.

> And another thing we have to look at is the low entrance fee. 200-300 is far
> too low. Any serious person would presumably be earning enough to shell out at
> least 2K for a conference - and think it is well worth it.

We could tier it (student, corporate etc.) I don't see a need to raise
the fees just for the sake of raising the fees.

> these are randomn ideas - I think the time has come to start summarising all
> these discussions in a wiki page so that we have some idea where we are going.

Let is go on for a while longer and someone can summarise this.

-- 
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in