On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Jaseem Abid <jaseemabid@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 5:51 PM, Noufal Ibrahim KV <noufal@nibrahim.net.in> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 07 2014, vijay kumar wrote:
Am I the only one who thinks that 60% newbies at a conference is a bad thing? Are we even thinking about why folks who attended last year didn't come this year?
I was quite surprised at the show of hands during Kushal's keynote. Almost everyone was a first timer! Unless the growth rate of conference is 30%, this means around half the folks didn't come back! The reason why I volunteered for open spaces this year was to make such
discussions happen and it sadly eventually led to another whole lot of
introduction to X and Y, except one or 2 good ones, which I'm happy about. We had too few talks and discussions about interesting things. I was literally craving for someone to come up with a talk like 'Why stackless is bloody cool'. It didn't happen and I'm sad about it. There was nothing about core python. There was no rip python apart session, or 'this simple library you can contribute to' session showing code. *In my very humble opinion, that is what adds real value to conferences, not teaching python to another 1000 folks, who wont use it themselves ever again*. I'm not making this up, now we are in a situation where experienced folks don't come because its too newbie stuff and newbies don't come because they don't know Python already.
Running with the idea of Miniconf, would it help to assign specific themes or tracks to attract quality talks? For example, Python and Computer Science. A talk about writing a quine in Python is perhaps elementary but not something a lot of people are likely to come across on their own. Or a in depth exploration of the sort algorithm as implemented in standard library. Something that students can connect to and something that will be interesting to experts as well. May be mark one of the parallel sessions as Exploring Python and fill it with rapid fire 15 min talks which introduce a topic, a area, a lib and instead of doing examples and basic documentation just provide tons of pointers. The inspiration here is personal. I got introduced to Pycon when I came across a talk someone gave on RML - a markup language to generate PDFs. This can be useful for beginners and others can simply avoid it.
Quoting Noufal, I'm all in for making "PyCon India [..] an event which is for advanced high quality talks"
I remember receiving this advice about my Pycon talk: if in doubt, make it more challenging. If the audience cannot keep up, they can always catch up with you offline but if they feel bored, they are likely to just ignore everything. I think we need to apply this advice to the conference as a whole. It needs to feel more challenging to be engaging and to get people for coming back for more. Regards, Abhaya