On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 5:15 PM, Navin Kabra <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:navin@smriti.com">navin@smriti.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hi All,<br>The Pune "local" team is meeting early next week to discuss details of PyCon 2012, the most important agenda item being Venue finalization. We will keep this mailing list updated with the outcome of our discussions.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>We met yesterday. Dhananjay Nene, Harshad Gune, Harshad Oak, Saager Mhatre, Ramakrishna Reddy and Navin Kabra attended. Here are the topics we discussed:<br><br>Venue: I've posted the relevant section of the discussion in the "PyCon 2012: Venue" thread<br>
Sponsorships: Dhananjay will post an update<br>Dates: I've posted the relevant section of the discussion in new thread titled "PyCon 2012 Possible Dates." Please use that thread for all dates related discussion<br>
Budget and Ticket Pricing: See Notes Below<br>Number of days and Format: See Notes Below<br><br>Overall, I think we need to freeze the venue and the sponsorship document within the next few weeks, so please make it a point to respond to those topics in the appropriate threads.<br>
<br>Budget and Ticket Pricing:<br><ul><li>Last year, we charged Rs. 300 early bird (400 later) for the delegates. The per person variable cost (which includes food, T-shirt, doAttend commission, and some overheads) came to about Rs. 750. In the last few weeks leading up to the conference, our budget was barely covering our costs, and we were in the danger of losing money with each additional registration. Thus, we closed registrations a bit early, and also withdrew our plans for publicizing PyCon amongst Pune colleges.<br>
</li><li>We would prefer to not be in a similar situation. The cleanest solution is to recover the variable cost from delegates. This time, the variable costs will be slightly higher since we're likely to have a swag bag in addition to the T-shirt. <br>
</li><li>Hence, it is suggested that this time, we should probably have
Rs. 400 early bird (500 later) for students and something like
Rs. 1500 early bird (1750 later) for professionals. The total number of cheap tickets (Rs. 400/500 ones) should be capped at a number like 300 or 350, and after those are over, everyone has to buy the more expensive one. <br>
</li><li>Last year the number of students were probably around 200,
but that's because we pulled back from doing student oriented
publicity. This time we could substantially increase that number.<br></li><li>Should we charge for tutorials separately? Problems: Enforcement and monitoring would be too of an overhead. This will
probably discourage students from attending the main conference. </li><li>When should online registrations close - so we have a good headcount?</li></ul><br>Number of days and format:<br><ul><li>Should we have the same format as last year or change something?</li>
<li>Should it be just 2 days instead of 3 days - because attendance
drops on Sunday? Last year we probably had a 15% - 20% drop
in attendance on Sunday.</li><li>The cost also goes down if we have just 2 days. But maybe we should
not cut anything in the conference just for cost reasons -
we can easily increase our sponsorships to cover costs.</li><li>Should we have tutorials on Sunday instead of Friday?</li><li>Should we have an semi-independent workshop for Python
beginners? This need not necessarily be "Pycon" branded
but the intention is to increase the number of students
and beginners who can attend Pycon and get something useful
out of it. Should this be on Wed/Thu, so out-of-towners can
attend, or should it be one or two weekends earlier so that
people can attend on a weekend. The former will have low
attendance due to it being during working days; the latter
will be appropriate only for Pune local people.</li><li>Instead of 1 day of "tutorials" (which really turned out to be workshops) and 2 days of the main conference, should we instead split it into "Beginners" and "Advanced"? This will also allow us to split the venue (see detailed discussion in the "PyCon 2012: Venue" thread on this topic.)</li>
</ul><p>Thoughts?</p><p><br></p></div></div>