[portland] OSB and python: a proposal

[Selena Deckelmann]

Hi folks,

So, I heard through the grapevine that folks weren't happy with the
coverage of python at OS Bridge.

And I read through the thread. I have a suggestion at the bottom of
this message that I hope you will consider, but first - here's a bunch
of stuff I typed out that I hope you will read:

First, let me say, I am totally excited that you care enough to read
through our schedule and comment on it. I think in the future, we need
to provide a way to look at suggested talks in a schedule-like
interface so that folks can provide more feedback earlier on
(especially before the committee makes selections!) regarding what
they'd like to see. I say this because we posted the session list a
while ago, and didn't receive any feedback about the lack of python.

Second, it would have been greatly helpful to have had more people
volunteering early on around the conference program and shaping of
what the conference was going to become. We did have a member of the
python community involved in talk selection, but because of scheduling
(mostly my fault) we didn't really have as much interaction as I would
have liked to have. Now, we're, of course, interested in day-of
volunteers, but with only two weeks to go until the event.. it's tough
to change the direction of a fast-moving train.

Finally, the conference is definitely about cross-language
collaboration, crazy and silly ideas, cultural hacking and what it
means for us to be collaborating both in Portland, and around the
world on code that we really care about. So, we don't emphasize any
particular language. There was a fair bit of PHP this year - probably
because the talks suggested by PHP folks seemed particularly
interesting to the committee. We didn't actually get that many Ruby
proposals, and while there were a lot of Perl proposals, I believe we
only accepted one. We got a lot of functional language talks, and a
ton of things involving infrastructure/operations/engineering. I think
this reflects some of the problems that our peers are focused on right
now. Or at least the folks that submitted talks. :)

All that said, there are a couple openings for talks left. So here is
what I propose:

If this group would like to nominate a particular proposal for
inclusion, I'm happy to do that.  We reserve a few slots for
last-minute changes, and so this is not out of protocol to do so. This
all of course this depends on who is available, etc. But if you'd like
to as a group organize something and recommend a talk, I will take
your recommendation and add it to the schedule as soon as you're
ready.

-selena

-- 
http://chesnok.com/daily - me