[Inpycon] Pune for pycon 2011

[Dhananjay Nene]

All,

This is to formally document our interest in hosting Pycon India 2011 in
Pune. Note that this thought was initiated a little over 2 days ago and this
is the progress we have been able to make so far.


*Team :

*We were able to put together this team through pure word of mouth and
almost everyone contacted immediately showed an extremely active interest
and enthusiasm and is listed below. We are aware of at least two more who
have shown interest, at least one of them widely known within the Python
community. We just haven't had the time to pull them into the discussions
yet, and we have not even put out the word on pune python group yet, and I
believe once we do that there will be many more who probably will share the
enthusiasm to participate and make this happen.

The team is Cc'ed on this email, and a brief description about their python
and general event organisation background (in alphabetical order) follows


   - *Baishampayan Ghose aka BG* : Should need no introduction to Python
   community or bangpypers list. Chief geek and Co-founder - Infinitely Beta,
   paisa.com - uses python and tornado amongst other technologies. Very keen
   sharer of knowledge, conducts many talks and has organised many user group
   meetings.

   - *Dhananjay Nene (Lead)* : Occasional participant in bangpypers,
   consulting architect and part of the programming team for two B2B SaaS
   services currently in production - both using Pylons. Last major
   organisation experience was 20 years ago, as a member of the core committee
   of IIM Ahmedabad Marketing fair, primarily responsible for designing the
   systems and operations of and responsible for the control room which
   individually routed more than 10k people based on their marketing
   demograpics - an organisation effort that took almost an year. Regularly
   talks at many tech events in Pune and presented at "Functional Programming
   in Python" at Pycon 2010.

   - *Harshad Oak* : Regularly organises 3 to 4 conferences every year in
   pune (commercially). Also runs Rightrix, and indicthreads.com. Also
   started pythonthreads.com, a few years ago, but then concentrated his
   efforts on indicthreads. Creator of the PythonPune mailing list.

   - *Navin Kabra* : Perhaps best known for his extremely popular
   punetech.com which is a highly respected tech community site, he is also
   the CTO and co-founder of bharathealth.com and chose django to write his
   code to. Navin is the quietly popular guy with connections and relationships
   running both deep and wide into Pune's academicia and corporates . Has been
   an instrumental participant in a number of events including proto.in pune
   open coffee club, techweekend pune, and many other blog camps and bar camps
   in addition to organising user group events.

   <http://proto.in/>
   - *Steven Fernandez aka steve aka lonetwin* : Again probably quite known
   to many pythonistas, has organised user group events. Not sure which is his
   preferred python framework poison.

It is this teams collective belief and confidence that they have sufficient
goodwill, respect and networks to rally both volunteers and participation
from local students, academicia, and corporates as necessary to pull of an
event of the size of Pycon India. In a lighter vein, our diversity is also
reflected by our selection of different python web frameworks.

To quote from Navin's mail to the this mailing list a day or two ago :

"Pune can definitely host the event. We have enough interested volunteers, a
very strong community (the PythonPune mailing list is not very active in
spite of 100+ members, but the Pune linux users group, the Pune Open Coffee
Club, CSI Pune and PuneTech are all very strong, and have enough pythonistas
in them that we can put together a very strong team on the ground. And of
course, venues and colleges is absolutely not a problem here.)". It should
also be noted that proximity to Mumbai is unlikely to hurt.

*Venue*

At this stage the team has put together a candidate set of venues, some of
those descriptions are documented below. We believe we need to work a little
bit more with the Pycon India team to size the expected audience and decide
which venues should be considered more attractive than others. Kindly note
that we have not got in touch with any one of these venue managements since
we would like to discuss exactly what we should use as the right criteria
for prioritising them. Also we would like to be sure there is appropriate
interest in considering Pune as the hosting city, before we start contacting
the appropriate folks responsible for these venues. The venues are listed
below in no particular order.

1. College of Engineering Pune:
    Advantages: Large Auditorium. Space/Classrooms not a problem. Great
location (center of town)
    Disadvantages: Auditorium is a little dark and a little old.

2. Persistent Systems:
    Advantages: Excellent Auditorium. Great location (center of town)
    Disadvantages: Additional rooms would be an issue - 3rd room likely to
be small; 4th room non-existent.

3. Bharati Vidyapeeth / PICT (both colleges with similar pros/cons):
    Advantages: Would be enthusiastic about hosting the event; space wont be
an issue
    Disadvantages: Location. A little far from the airport (35 minutes)

4. SIMC / Symbiosis Vishwabhavan (both non-tech colleges)
    Advantages: Good location, good auditorium, space is not a problem
    Disadvantages: Not a tech college, so wont have faculty/students
interested in Pycon

5. Army Institute of Technology (engineering college):
   Advantages: Location near airport (a little outside the city, though);
enthusiastic about having/supporting events
  Disadvantages: Auditorium capacity is only 200 (is that enough?). A little
outside the city.

6. Symbiosis; Lavale (multiple colleges, including SIT a tech college
interested in tech events):
   Advantages: Venue - lovely location on a hilltop. Great campus. Brand new
audi & classrooms.
   Disadvantage: Location - completely out of town (45 minutes from town, 1
hour from airport; 15/20 minutes from nearest good hotels). But beauty of
campus might overcome this disadvantage. We can probably get someone to
sponsor a couple of bus trips to and from the center of the city.

*Date of Event :

*To preserve continuity with earlier Pycon India, we would like to target
the last or second last weekend of September 2011. However we believe it
would be appropriate to review the local college examination schedules and
may need to adjust it slightly to ensure that students can participate in
terms of volunteeriing, attending and learning.

Dhananjay
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