[Inpycon] PyCon 2012 Planning Meeting Notes - 12 March

[Navin Kabra]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Navin Kabra <navin at smriti.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
> The Pune "local" team is meeting early next week to discuss details of
> PyCon 2012, the most important agenda item being Venue finalization. We
> will keep this mailing list updated with the outcome of our discussions.
>

We met yesterday. Dhananjay Nene, Harshad Gune, Harshad Oak, Saager Mhatre,
Ramakrishna Reddy and Navin Kabra attended. Here are the topics we
discussed:

Venue: I've posted the relevant section of the discussion in the "PyCon
2012: Venue" thread
Sponsorships: Dhananjay will post an update
Dates: I've posted the relevant section of the discussion in new thread
titled "PyCon 2012 Possible Dates." Please use that thread for all dates
related discussion
Budget and Ticket Pricing: See Notes Below
Number of days and Format: See Notes Below

Overall, I think we need to freeze the venue and the sponsorship document
within the next few weeks, so please make it a point to respond to those
topics in the appropriate threads.

Budget and Ticket Pricing:

   - Last year, we charged Rs. 300 early bird (400 later) for the
   delegates. The per person variable cost (which includes food, T-shirt,
   doAttend commission, and some overheads) came to about Rs. 750. In the last
   few weeks leading up to the conference, our budget was barely covering our
   costs, and we were in the danger of losing money with each additional
   registration. Thus, we closed registrations a bit early, and also withdrew
   our plans for publicizing PyCon amongst Pune colleges.
   - We would prefer to not be in a similar situation. The cleanest
   solution is to recover the variable cost from delegates. This time, the
   variable costs will be slightly higher since we're likely to have a swag
   bag in addition to the T-shirt.
   - Hence, it is suggested that this time, we should probably have Rs. 400
   early bird (500 later) for students and something like Rs. 1500 early bird
   (1750 later) for professionals. The total number of cheap tickets (Rs.
   400/500 ones) should be capped at a number like 300 or 350, and after those
   are over, everyone has to buy the more expensive one.
   - Last year the number of students were probably around 200, but that's
   because we pulled back from doing student oriented publicity. This time we
   could substantially increase that number.
   - Should we charge for tutorials separately? Problems: Enforcement and
   monitoring would be too of an overhead. This will probably discourage
   students from attending the main conference.
   - When should online registrations close - so we have a good headcount?


Number of days and format:

   - Should we have the same format as last year or change something?
   - Should it be just 2 days instead of 3 days - because attendance drops
   on Sunday? Last year we probably had a 15% - 20% drop in attendance on
   Sunday.
   - The cost also goes down if we have just 2 days. But maybe we should
   not cut anything in the conference just for cost reasons - we can easily
   increase our sponsorships to cover costs.
   - Should we have tutorials on Sunday instead of Friday?
   - Should we have an semi-independent workshop for Python beginners? This
   need not necessarily be "Pycon" branded but the intention is to increase
   the number of students and beginners who can attend Pycon and get something
   useful out of it. Should this be on Wed/Thu, so out-of-towners can attend,
   or should it be one or two weekends earlier so that people can attend on a
   weekend. The former will have low attendance due to it being during working
   days; the latter will be appropriate only for Pune local people.
   - Instead of 1 day of "tutorials" (which really turned out to be
   workshops) and 2 days of the main conference, should we instead split it
   into "Beginners" and "Advanced"? This will also allow us to split the venue
   (see detailed discussion in the "PyCon 2012: Venue" thread on this topic.)

Thoughts?
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