[Baypiggies] Baypiggies Audience survey 2006?

[Stephen McInerney]

John, and everyone,

Firstly there was a member interest survey in March 2003, I'm the guy who 
compiled it:
If you googled you would find the results at:
http://deirdre.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2003-March/000080.html
and the survey was at: 
http://deirdre.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2003-March/000067.html

Your proposal was fine but we had already planned to reask those questions 
anyway + more.
(geographical location, experience level, amount of Python in job function, 
primary programming language, OS, preferred IDE, preferred GUI, are you 
willing to speak? if so on what topics? etc.)
Wes suggested surveymonkey.com which allows asking up to 20 questions.
Please suggest anything else that you think would be useful to ask.

You can find plenty of historical discussion from mid-2003 about interests 
and what sort of talks:
  http://deirdre.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2003-March
  http://deirdre.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2003-April
  ...
  http://deirdre.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2003-August

Also Chad Netzer's many good suggestions and talks he presented:
http://deirdre.org/pipermail/baypiggies/2003-July/000144.html
You can see from the archives that Chad, Drew, Wes, Aahz, Danny, Jimmy and 
others have made many suggestions.

You are correct that the range of topics presented has been getting more 
narrow;
and in my opinion neglecting some more generic topics. (A few thoughts of 
mine: * databases * scientific computing and visualization * how to make a 
career out of Python (in areas outside web development and testing) * 
recruiter evening * IDE demonstrations * how to author and sell Pythonic 
shareware * other languages and paradigms (Ruby, Cocoa, Eiffel, Haskell) * 
Zope + Plone overview * Pythonic startups )
What has been presented is mainly a function of who is willing to speak.
Everyone is free to speak, or invite, or suggest a speaker. Feel free to get 
involved.

One positive way to interpret the recent narrowing of focus is as a 
side-effect of the fact that so many people who used to do Python mainly as 
a garage hobby now do it as a day-job, so their interests are now dictated 
by their bosses :)

Regards,
Stephen