[pycon-za] Official call for speakers

[Maciej Fijalkowski]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Neil Muller <drnlmuller at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 August 2012 17:00, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ok. Let's retract a bit. Why do you say overly long slots are actually
>> better than overly short slots?
>
> Of what benefit is a talk where the speaker does not have time to
> adequately explain the problem and the solution adopted?

The benefit is typically (besides the fact that you can fit more
talks) so the speaker has to think harder how to convey his idea. Most
talks don't have to occupy 45 minutes of talking. Both the quality of
listeners and the quality of speakers deteriorate over time. If the
speaker has harsher time constraints, he would try harder to cut
irrelevant details in order to provide the actual picture. Some talks
are not fitting in such times, but the majority of them completely do.
You want the diversity more than depth on such conferences.

I hate to bring this up, since I don't believe in argument by
authority, but I've been to a lot of conferences and generally those
that have shorter talks are of higher quality (for related or
unrelated reasons).