[Inpycon] Open spaces & Lightning Talks

[Shrayas rajagopal]

Hi Arvi,

Find my opinions inline


On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 5:06 PM, Arvi Krishnaswamy <arvi at alumni.iastate.edu>
wrote:

> Just a few other thoughts.
>
> Chime in if you agree and have ideas on what can be done.
>
> - Last year, there was limited signage to help people figure out what was
> going on where. To be clear, I'm not saying there was no signage - just
> that when the place is crowded, it's hard to find the signs.
>

​Totally agree with this. Last year was my first time attending PyCon and I
had absolutely NO idea what the concept of open spaces meant. I think this
year, there will be a lot more first timers and it would be a great win for
us if we organize it in such a way that these first timers are also able to
have open talks themselves.


> - Nimhans is fairly spread out, and I often found myself trekking from one
> far end to the other and back and forth. It'd be nice to see if there's
> something we can do to help reduce this.
>

​Other than signs, I'm not sure what we can do here. It is pretty HUGE. ​A
small digital map of the place if someone could work on it would be pretty
helpful.


> - I noticed that Kenneth was mobbed with a long line of people waiting to
> talk to him. It may also be interesting to have some structured Q&A time
> with keynote speakers in an open space since I bet a lot of the knowledge
> shared could benefit a larger group.
>

​This sounds like a great idea too. Another thing that was suggested was
that we can have a place for​ people whose talks didn't get selected to
hang out. One thing that comes to mind is having something like Reddit AMA
sessions? Where people hang out in a place and say Ask Me Anything.


> - It was hard to find people with whom you shared common interests. Having
> some way to indicate this on your badge or a sticker would be great.
>

​Agree. We could have some kind of a wall where people write "Name -
Interest - Twitter handle / Phone number" so that they could work things
out. But that would still be a 1 to 1 reach. We need a way to reach a bunch
of people interested in a certain topic. Not sure how this is done, but I
think that this is the real use case of open spaces? One thing would be
have designated areas in the​ open spaces where people can socialize.
Something like "databases", "security", etc. We can work something out
regarding that. This is just an idea.


> - I felt the main auditorium projector screens were a bit small, and it
> made it hard to read some of the slides if you ended up withs seats in the
> back.
>

​Very true. This time over at the FifthElephant conference HasGeek decided
to have 2 screens and it did make some kind of an impact. ​


>
> Arvi
>
> _______________________________________________
> Inpycon mailing list
> Inpycon at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/inpycon
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/inpycon/attachments/20140730/6f6d5dd8/attachment.html>