[Inpycon] Feedback for Future PyCon Conferences

[Sayan Chowdhury]

Hey Kaustubh,

> Let me start by echoing the sentiments of others by saying a big thank you to all the organizers and volunteers who helped make PyCon India 2018 a grand success. It was my first time ever and I really enjoyed it.

Glad you liked the event.

>
> The purpose of my mail is to present some observations which I hope can be used for making future versions of the conference even better and grander. Please do not take this in the wrong way, my purpose is purely to give those who will guide future conferences (which could include me too) a few things to take into account to make the events even better.
>
> 1) During Armin's keynote, there were 3 times that I recollect he was disturbed / distracted. Once by sound engineers shouting, once by a cell phone ringing in the backstage and another by workers shouting behind the stage. It might be worthwhile to sensitize workers / volunteers about the importance of this before the event begins, if possible.
>
> 2) The proximity of the stalls to the auditorium meant that any excitement in the stalls (participants wining a quiz?) resulted in disturbance during the talks. Perhaps we could aim for better separation between the stalls and the auditorium, if the venue permits.

Agreed, this is the first time we went ahead with this kind of layout,
I was not involved in discussions when the layout was decided but I
think a reason could be that these kind of venues (hotels auditoriums)
restrict putting up stalls outside the hall so this layout was tried
out. Surely this would be taken care of in the future.

And yes, the disturbance during Armin's keynote is valid. In the
future we will make sure that we have people on our side to take care
of that.

>
> 3) Developer sprints occupied 2 whole days which means that people had to make travel plans to actually participate in this. For some reason, it was chosen to keep announcements of the tickets a last minute thing. As a result, there were some people who took 2 extra leaves / hotel bookings but were unlucky to not be able to book the sprint tickets. It would have been nice if people knew in advance if they needed to plan for these 2 days well in advance.

So, the reason we opened up the half of the tickets during devsprint
was to promote dev sprint during the conference also. A lot of people
come to know about dev sprints during the conference but cannot attend
because of the non-availability of the tickets which we tried to fix
through announcing the dev sprints sales during the event. We need to
see how this can be fixed.

>
> 4) All people participating in a given workshop could be made part of a temporary mailing list whose unique e-mail address could be handed to the organizers of the workshop so that they could send out all communication directly. I agree that Slack is a wonderful tool but in many cases it so happened that by the time people had their Slack set up, they missed out on important instructions for preparing the laptops.

This is something we did in the past but missed out on this year. We
usually introduced the participants with the workshop coordinator
prior to the workshop day to at least have the participants do the
setup before coming for the workshop.

>
> 5) Open Spaces can be more streamlined. I remember going to a specific open space only to find something else going on there eventually realizing that I missed both the talk and the chance to be a part of the open space.
>
Was it a mismatch of timing? How can we make it more streamlined? I
got one feedback that Open Spaces felt to be secluded which we will
try to fix from next PyCons'

-- 
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


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