Hi,

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 7:22 PM, Kracekumar Ramaraju <me@kracekumar.com> wrote:


On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 4:26 PM, Noufal Ibrahim KV <noufal@nibrahim.net.in> wrote:

> Do we really have so much advance talk submissions ?

We won't attract any advanced talk submissions because people who do
that kind of thing see PyCon India as a large gathering of newbies with
very basic talks.

I personally wouldn't submit a talk about anything advanced if I knew
that most of the audience were first timers. Why would I? If I knew that
the people who were attending are experienced, I'd be willing to put
stuff out in front of them to solicit feedback and have interesting
discussions. If most of the audience won't understand what I'm saying,
why should I submit a talk at all?


If 40% of audience are non newbies, still there is high audience for interaction.

+1, 40% is a good number. And if there are 1000 participants, I would say anything more than 200 should be considered a good crowd to present something serious and get feedback.
 

For example we had this rule as part of Talk selection. The talk `Medusa: A much faster Python implementation based on the Dart Virtual Machine  ` was given by college student and first timer.
It was one of the well received talk and was considered advanced talk.

         That's a fine example - But there was also another talk(I believe the first one on day one after the keynote in Audi 1) which was not well presented. And those who got seats in the back half couldn't even figure out what the presenter was showing.(agree that slide visibility is a different problem, but way it is presented was also not very good).

 
I'm strident about this because apart from the talk quality, everything
is good at the conference. This is the only thing I've heard big
complaints about and this, in my opinion, is the way to fix it.


Talk quality != advanced level talks.

         Agreed - Talk quality and advanced talks are different. But if I understand correct, Noufal is talking about "in depth" content in talks. For eg. "Multi threaded web server in python" might look like a very simple topic. But if they have stuff on how they handle GIL, I would call that an advanced level talk.


While we discuss this, I have some feedback on the venue itself(which happens to be the subject of the email :) - Audi 2 is not big enough to accomodate large audience. There were 3 talks in Audi 2 which I had to miss because by the time I switched from Audi 1 to 2, it got filled up and I either had to stand at very back. I don't know a lot of places in Bangalore - But if there is something where one hall can accomodate 1000+ (for the keynote) and the other can accomodate 500-600 that should be good. Otherwise, we get constrained by space. Thanks
 


--
Thank you
Balachandran Sivakumar