[Inpycon] Summary of the PyCon India 2018 Planning Meeting

[Anand Chitipothu]

Good to see great momentum.

I've couple of suggestions.

I think it is counter productive to have one-day dedicated for  Python for
kids. Having an exclusive day forces people who are not very involved to
skip it. I think the conference should try to make it possible to interact
people with different interests rather than creating silos. Wouldn't it be
of great value for people working with kids to interact with IoT and ML
expects and take some ideas home?

I also suggest to consider conducting workshops along with the conference.
What we have been following is the US PyCon style with one/two days of
workshops before the conference and every participant pays for each
workshop he want to attend. There is other popular model used in
EuroPython[1], PyCon UK[2] and many other conferences is to conduct the
workshops along with the conference. Both of their advantages and
disadvantages. I was a strong proponent of the first approach, but after
attending couple of these conferences I started to change my opinion. I
think having both talks and workshops at the same time is lot more
convenient to than having workshops on a separate day. If I want to attend
just one workshop, I can spend rest of the day attend other talks and
interacting with people, which is not possible when workshops are on a
separate day. Believe me, it is very hard to decide which workshop to
attend before getting into conference mood :)

I suggest making the conference 3 days + 2 days sprints, with workshops
along with talks. We can have a kids track on the second day and reserve
last 2 slots of that day for presentations by kids showcasing what they've
built during the day. This gives a chance for everyone attending the
conference to experience what amazing things kids could build. PyCon UK did
it like this this time[3] and it was amazing. I don't think I would have
attended that if they had a separate day for kids before the main
conference.

[1]: https://ep2017.europython.eu/p3/schedule/ep2017/
[2]: http://2017.pyconuk.org/schedule/
[3]: http://2017.pyconuk.org/education/

Anand


On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 5:37 PM, Sayan Chowdhury <
sayan.chowdhury2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> We had our first planning meeting on 12th November 2017 at the Cafe
> Coffee Day, opposite to the Forum Mall, Koramangala. The meeting had a
> attendance of around 20 people. I am posting the summary of the
> meeting for those who could not attend the meeting.
>
> * Timeline leading upto PyCon India 2018:
>     - PyCon India 2018 is planning to be organized in the month of
> August/September.
>     - Since this is the 10th year of the event, the plan is to have
> the conference on the dates 26th and 27th September, 2018 (As PyCon
> India 2009 happened on these dates)
>     - Website should be done by beginning of December
>     - Reaching out to sponsors would be starting from December/January.
>     - CFP would start in mid-Feb and close in May.
>     - Schedule should be up by the month of July
>     - Tickets would open up in March/April and close 1 month before
> the conference.
>
>
> * Days of the event:
>     - Day 1: Python for Kids
>         ** We have formed a team at the meeting for the Python for
> Kids, and a mail will be sent if someone wants to join can help out.
>         ** This team will provide with a detailed report on whether it
> is needed to have a separate day for this event. During the meeting it
> was discussed that, the event could have a good number of students so
> it would need to have a separate day for the event.
>         ** Need to reach out to sponsors for Hardware according to the
> plan the team sets.
>         ** Allocate % sponsorship to procure hardware which will be
> given to off to the kids.
>         ** The team will reach out to colleges/schools. They would be
> divided into different group based of age-groups.
>         ** Plan is to start workshops and follow-up workshops in
> schools leading up to the event.
>     - Day 2: Workshop
>     - Day 3 & 4: Conference Days
>     - Day 5 & 6: Dev Sprint Days
>
>
> * Venue Options
> - 2015 had a crowd of 1500 people. So we are expecting a crowd of
> 2000-2500 people at PyCon India 2018.
> - We need to check the PyCon India handbook and update wherever necessary.
> - The probable venue options are NIMHANS, BIEC, Palace Grounds,
> MLR-Whitefield.
> - Hitesh would check the requirements at Palace Grounds.
> - Soumyo would check the venue MLR-Whitefield.
>
>
> * Keynotes:
>   - 8+ Keynotes at the conference from various fields of Computing
> (eminent persons from various fields, library authors, core FOSS
> developers etc) equally divided from India and outside India.
>   - Get suggestion from the community on who could be the good
> domains, based on that get suggestion on the good keynotes.
>
> * Content Team
> - Build a good content team, for blogs and write ups for the social media
> team.
> - Send out your suggestions if you know someone who would be good for this
> team.
>
> * Communication channels:
>   - Mailing list/IRC to remain the primary communication channel for
> all the tasks.
>     ** IRC channel is #pyconindia
>   - Telegram few days before the event.
>
> --
> Sayan Chowdhury <https://sayanchowdhury.dgplug.org/>
> Senior Software Engineer, Fedora Engineering - Emerging Platform
> GPG Fingerprint : 0F16 E841 E517 225C 7D13  AB3C B023 9931 9CD0 5C8B
>
>
> Proud to work at The Open Organization!
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20171114/5a36abd1/attachment.html>