Dear All,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm sure there are others with more concerns and ideas to make things better. But for me specifically, these five were most striking.
Best,
Kaustubh