Mailman 3 January 2016 - Pycon-openspaces

Open Spaces Update
by Anna Ossowski 26 Jan '16

26 Jan '16

Hey everyone! I just wanted to update you about a few things and recap some things we discussed to make sure we are all on the same page: * We will be using two boards for the Open Spaces sign up this year. This will give people the ability to plan a bit more (at least a day) ahead than they have been able to in the past. * In the past there was the possibility for certain groups/people to reserve an Open Spaces slot in advance before the board was officially up. This has lead to some confusion as sometimes the Open Spaces team forgot to actually mark these reserved times on the board which lead to some rooms and slots being double-booked. In order to prevent this from happening I decided it’s best not to do this this year. Brandon brought up that this could lead to some groups not being able to announce their Open Spaces ahead of time or not being able to reserve a slot they feel comfortable with. Ewa therefore suggested to add a „add your own time/room“ line to the bottom of the Open Spaces board for the first time this year, which I think is a brilliant idea and which I think will help accommodate „special wishes“ and also give people a little more freedom. Of course the slots there will be limited too but I think it’s worth a try. Last year we noticed for example that people were forming their own little Open Spaces at certain booths in the expo hall rather than using any of the Open Spaces rooms. In addition to that people will be able to sign up for the first day of Open Spaces starting the evening before at the opening reception. * Regarding the @pycon_events Twitter account and scheduling a tweet for each Open Space as a reminder to people, I still really like the idea in a way but I believe this would be quite the time commitment and also stressful and therefore I don’t think it’s feasible for us to do this this year and therefore would like to postpone the idea until next year. Instead I would like for us to encourage people to tweet about their Open Spaces like Hobson suggested using the hashtag #pyconopenspaces, which we will be promoting via blog posts, Twitter etc. and advertise/announce their own Open Spaces this way. By following the hashtag people interested in attending the Open Spaces will still be up-to-date. * We discussed the idea of creating some sort of poll to give people interested in organizing an Open Space the chance to ask the PyCon audience for feedback regarding whether their particular Open Space idea evokes enough interest. I’m not against the idea but I’m also not sure how we would pull this off and whether it would really be worth the effort. I wonder if we could also make use of Twitter for that and simply encourage people to tweet something like „Would anyone be interested in an Open Space on robotics? #pyconopenspaces“. Twitter is usually a great tool for generating feedback of all sorts so I’m pretty positive that this approach would work. I feel like we’re making a lot of great progress and gathering a lot of ideas and I would like to thank you all for participating in the discussions and keeping the ideas coming. As you may have noticed this year my personal goal for the Open Spaces is to get a feel for them, improve some things, but still make sure all of the ideas are feasible for us. Sometimes an idea sounds great in theory but in practice it doesn’t work out. I believe that after running the Open Spaces as a team for the first time this year we’ll have a much better idea of what it’s like and what we could do for next year so always keep in mind that if an idea is not being taken into account for this year, this doesn’t mean the idea is dead, it just means we will reassess it for next year :) Finally, I just wanted to inform you that I’m getting ready to travel to and speak at PyTennessee next weekend. I’ll be in the US February 4-19 and will be less available than I usually am so if it takes me longer to get back to you via email, please bear with me. Thank you and have a great week! Anna

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Re: [Pycon-openspaces] Event tweet idea
by Anna Ossowski 20 Jan '16

20 Jan '16

Forgot to cc the mailing list. > Am 20.01.2016 um 05:14 schrieb Anna Ossowski <ossanna16(a)gmx.de>: > > That is a great idea to encourage Open Space hosts to put their Twitter handle on the card and tweet about the Open Spaces themselves maybe with the hashtag #pyconopenspaces so those interested in attending the Open Spaces can easily find these tweets. The hashtag could easily be promoted via the official @pycon account. > > I appreciate all your ideas and I’m willing to explore more of them next year. Since this is my first time as Open Spaces chair and our first time working together as a team I just think it’s a good idea to improve things but still keep them simple so we can all get a feel of what this work is like, how time consuming it is beforehand and onsite, and how we work together as a team. So I see this year as an experiment or prototype and next year I’d love to work on even more improvements :) This also means that just because we won’t do something this year, we can’t try it next year so I’d highly like to encourage both you and Kinga to keep adding your ideas to our Trello board. > > Please do know though that I hear and appreciate all your thoughts and ideas, Hobson :) > Anna > >> Am 20.01.2016 um 04:56 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com <mailto:hobsonlane@gmail.com>>: >> >> I think the tweeting would be much more manageable than you are imagining. But I'm sure your 2-board approach will be perfectly adequate. Maybe we can brainstorm other ways to help improve buy-in and attendance at open spaces without being too much work for anyone. Perhaps helping hosts tweet a survey and/or announcement from their own account? An open space proposal card could include a place for a twitter account name so that attendees can follow specific open-spaces that they're interested. If I think of any other ideas I'll share. Look forward to hearing yours as well. >> >> --Hobson >> (503) 974-6274 >> gh <https://github.com/hobson/> twtr <https://twitter.com/hobsonlane> li <https://www.linkedin.com/in/hobsonlane> g+ <http://plus.google.com/+HobsonLane/> so <http://stackoverflow.com/users/623735/hobs> >> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 7:44 PM, Anna Ossowski <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: >> Hey Hobson, >> >> Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this. >> >> I like the idea but I still have my doubts whether this approach is feasible for us. I’ve been to PyCon and other conferences. I don’t constantly check Twitter during the conference on purpose because it simply overwhelms me to attend talks, chat to people, and monitor what’s going on on social media at the same time. If I would get several notifications every 2 hours about Open Spaces happening I would probably be even more overwhelmed or even annoyed at some point. Also I don’t know about other people, but I personally plan my day ahead and very rarely decide to attend talks or Open Spaces spontaneously. Also I still believe the tweet approach would be a stress factor for our little team. >> >> The two board system has the advantage of being simple, yet it gives people a good overview. Last year I personally just took a picture of the board to remember which Open Spaces I wanted to attend. If we think that a notification system is absolutely necessary I would take a different approach and integrate it into the app PyCon uses which lets people see all talks/tutorials/etc. and save them to their own personal event calendar (forgot what the name of that app is). On Monday evening for example we could then go ahead and feed the app with all Open Spaces for Tuesday, which would give people time to plan the Open Spaces into their schedule for the next day. The app also has the ability to let you schedule your own reminders if you wish to be reminded of events, and it is fairly easy to update the app in case of schedule changes, which might get confusing on Twitter. >> >> Thank you! >> Anna >> >> >> >> >>> Am 20.01.2016 um 02:50 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com <mailto:hobsonlane@gmail.com>>: >>> >>> I agree Anna. Composing thoughtful, timely tweets and replies would certainly be a big effort. That's way too much. >>> >>> But what about just checking the board once every 2 hours and buffering (in tweetdeck) a generic reminder tweet before each openspace? That would be a big help to attendees and open space hosts. All that's required of us is that one of us check the board every 2 hours and make sure the next two hours are reflected in the tweets on tweetdeck. If we rotated board duty we'd only have to check it once in the morning and once in the afternoon each. If a card goes up on the board within a couple hours or so before a new open space is scheduled, I don't think the host or attendees should expect a reminder tweet to go out. >>> >>> Your two-board idea is an interesting one, but a two-hour "sliding window" might do much more to help smooth things out. >>> >>> --Hobson >>> (503) 974-6274 <tel:%28503%29%20974-6274> >>> gh <https://github.com/hobson/> twtr <https://twitter.com/hobsonlane> li <https://www.linkedin.com/in/hobsonlane> g+ <http://plus.google.com/+HobsonLane/> so <http://stackoverflow.com/users/623735/hobs> >>> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Anna Ossowski <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: >>> Hello everyone! >>> >>> I put a little more thought into the idea we discussed yesterday about tweeting about the Open Spaces to remind people of when which Open Space is happening, and wanted to share my thoughts with you. >>> I love the idea of having a @pycon_events Twitter account and tweeting out reminders about the Open Spaces shortly before they start. I believe this could lead to higher attendance of the Open Spaces since checking the board a few times a day can be a hassle for attendees, especially since PyCon is a pretty busy event. >>> What I do feel a worried and stressed about though is the amount of tweets I/we would have to create, schedule, get out and maybe respond to several times a day. I do social media as part of my my job and other projects like PyLadies Remote and it can be extremely stressful if you want to do it well. I personally am a little worried about not being able to keep up with it well for the Open Spaces especially since there would be some time pressure. >>> >>> I was therefore pondering the idea of having two boards up for sign up: Let’s say on the first day people can sign up for the first and second day, on the second day people can sign up for the second and third day and so on. Some conferences also have people sign up online for the first day (which I personally don’t think is such a great idea but we could certainly discuss it) but if we had two boards up for two days everyday this would make it easier for people to plan and integrate the Open Spaces into their personal PyCon schedule, plus it might also make it a little easier for us because we could plan ahead. >>> >>> The Twitter idea is surely a great one but we’re only a small team of volunteers and I think we don’t want to run around and be stressed about getting the right tweets out at the right time all day but also enjoy PyCon so I’m not sure if this is feasible for us :) I would therefore suggest to try out having two sign up boards this year and see how it goes. We can always improve things for the future. >>> >>> I would love to hear your thoughts! >>> Anna >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Pycon-openspaces mailing list >>> Pycon-openspaces(a)python.org <mailto:Pycon-openspaces@python.org> >>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces <https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces> >>> >> >> >

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Event tweet idea
by Anna Ossowski 20 Jan '16

20 Jan '16

Hello everyone! I put a little more thought into the idea we discussed yesterday about tweeting about the Open Spaces to remind people of when which Open Space is happening, and wanted to share my thoughts with you. I love the idea of having a @pycon_events Twitter account and tweeting out reminders about the Open Spaces shortly before they start. I believe this could lead to higher attendance of the Open Spaces since checking the board a few times a day can be a hassle for attendees, especially since PyCon is a pretty busy event. What I do feel a worried and stressed about though is the amount of tweets I/we would have to create, schedule, get out and maybe respond to several times a day. I do social media as part of my my job and other projects like PyLadies Remote and it can be extremely stressful if you want to do it well. I personally am a little worried about not being able to keep up with it well for the Open Spaces especially since there would be some time pressure. I was therefore pondering the idea of having two boards up for sign up: Let’s say on the first day people can sign up for the first and second day, on the second day people can sign up for the second and third day and so on. Some conferences also have people sign up online for the first day (which I personally don’t think is such a great idea but we could certainly discuss it) but if we had two boards up for two days everyday this would make it easier for people to plan and integrate the Open Spaces into their personal PyCon schedule, plus it might also make it a little easier for us because we could plan ahead. The Twitter idea is surely a great one but we’re only a small team of volunteers and I think we don’t want to run around and be stressed about getting the right tweets out at the right time all day but also enjoy PyCon so I’m not sure if this is feasible for us :) I would therefore suggest to try out having two sign up boards this year and see how it goes. We can always improve things for the future. I would love to hear your thoughts! Anna

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Re: [Pycon-openspaces] Open Spaces planning
by Anna Ossowski 18 Jan '16

18 Jan '16

Thank you Hobson! I just wanted to clarify what our job as the Open Space committee is to make sure we’re all on the same page. Our main job is to facilitate the Open Spaces, which means we make it possible for people to organize their own little Open Spaces by providing rooms, a sign up board, ideas for Open Spaces, general infrastructure, and promotion. Our job is not to organize each little Open Space ourselves. The PyCon attendees will pick a topic, pick a room and a time onsite themselves. Onsite our main job will be to make sure to put up the sign up board everyday, monitor the board and make sure the Open Space topics are CoC appropriate, document the topics, and be there in case of questions. I hope this clarifies while voting on topics for example is not necessary as the people will sort of make that decision for themselves onsite :) Have a good week everyone and please feel free to add new cards, assign yourselves to cards, etc. Anna > Am 15.01.2016 um 21:46 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com>: > > Thank you. I may not have been logging on or searching for boards correctly. I see it now, and I added a couple cards. Feel free to edit or delete anything I put up. > > --Hobson > > On Jan 15, 2016 6:02 AM, "Anna Ossowski" <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: > Hi Hobson, > > I must have added the wrong Hobson Lane (user name hobsonlane) the first time. That’s strange because I used your email address to find you. Anyway, just readded you under the right user name :) > > Anna >> Am 15.01.2016 um 14:49 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com <mailto:hobsonlane@gmail.com>>: >> >> Hi Anna, >> >> I cant find the Open Space trello board under my user name "hobs". Could you re-add me? >> >> --Hobson >> >> On Jan 14, 2016 10:20 AM, "Anna Ossowski" <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: >> Hello Hobson and Kinga, >> >> I hope you’re both well! >> It’s the new year and PyCon is happening in just a few months. While our main work won’t start until closer to the conference, I just wanted to check in with both of you so we can start planning. >> >> I just created a Trello board for us, which I added both of you to. If you didn’t get added for some reason, please let me know your Trello name and I’ll add you again. Trello is a great tool for planning and collaboration so I thought it would be useful for us. >> >> I created 5 boards so far „To Do“, „In Progress“, „Done“, To Contact“, and „Ideas“. Please feel free to create new boards, add cards, or move cards around. I would also like to encourage you to assign yourself to tasks that you would like to tackle. I think the board names are pretty self-explanatory :) When you start working on a task, please just move it to the „In Progress“ board and when it’s done please move it to the „Done“ board. >> >> My guess is that we should start working on things in March at the latest to have enough time to get everything done before PyCon starts at the end of May but there are things we can start preparing now so feel free to tackle tasks whenever you have time. The only thing we should wait with until closer to PyCon is contacting people. If we contact them too early people might forget about it. >> >> If you have any questions or need anything, please feel free to contact me anytime :) >> >> Thank you! >> Anna >> _______________________________________________ >> Pycon-openspaces mailing list >> Pycon-openspaces(a)python.org <mailto:Pycon-openspaces@python.org> >> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces <https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces> >

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Re: [Pycon-openspaces] Open Spaces planning
by Anna Ossowski 18 Jan '16

18 Jan '16

Thank you for your input, Kinga! I still have concerns to be honest but if you both think it’s a great idea I’m certainly willing to try this approach. I just think it would be important that we communicate clearly that this is just „market research“ as Kinga called it and that this is non-binding. I wonder what the right platform for this would be to reach the most people. I’m thinking it would be best to implement this into the Open Spaces section on the PyCon website since I assume this is the place where people go to read about Open Spaces. I would guess a Google form or survey monkey would be less effective. I can chat to Brandon about this and ask him if this is possible. Would one of you be willing to take this on if we’re allowed to add this to the PyCon website? Thank you! Anna > Am 18.01.2016 um 19:09 schrieb Kinga Kięczkowska <k.kieczkowska(a)gmail.com>: > > Hello everyone, > > I understand your points (both of you :) ). I personally think that it is possible to do both things, that is: preserve the "free spirit" of open spaces and have a voting system. I wouldn't treat it as something final or binding, though; it might just be a good way of seeing what people are interested in. The poll could have an option of adding your own idea and voting for any number of options you find interesting. A bit like market research! That can also help people who feel like organising something, but aren't sure what exactly, or are hesitant about a couple of topics and don't know which one to choose. > > I'm also for not pressuring people, but if I was organising an open space myself, I'd want to know if there's anyone interested in participating. Seeing 0 votes next to my idea online would be less disappointing for me than seeing 0 people show up to my open space onsite. > > Of course, the options in the poll should not be in any way "binding" - people should of course be able to organize whatever comes to their minds during the conference ad hoc. > > Kinga > > 2016-01-18 18:01 GMT+00:00 Anna Ossowski <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>>: > That’s an interesting thought. Thank you for explaining that to me, Hobson! > So I’m a bit torn. On the one hand I understand the issue and think polling might be a good idea, on the other hand the big advantage of the Open Spaces is that they are very „free“ and informal in a way, unlike talks, which are chosen based on what people would like to see so if we did a poll I’m afraid we might scare people away from Open Spaces or put some sort of pressure on them to offer what others want to see and not what they would like their Open Space to be about. In general I’m a fan of letting people do what they love. > > If we did the poll beforehand it would also be an issue that our list of topics wouldn’t be extensive because people tend to come up with topics at PyCon spontaneously. I wonder if we could put up a second board and somehow facilitate a poll onsite but that’s just a thought. > > Maybe Kinga and Brandon can chime in. I’d be interested in their opinion on this. > > Thank you! > Anna > >> Am 18.01.2016 um 18:52 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com <mailto:hobsonlane@gmail.com>>: >> >> Gotcha. Perhaps polling would still be a way to inform organizers about the interests of their audience. It's also a good way to inform attendees about open spaces and get their "buy-in" for the range of topics/activities offered. Some of the open spaces seemed lightly attended in past years. I know when I hosted an open space last year, I would have benefited from such a survey. Only one person showed up to my open space on neural nets. If I'd known the interest level was so low I might have adjusted my topic and activity suggestion a bit. >> >> --Hobson >> >> --Hobson >> (503) 974-6274 <tel:%28503%29%20974-6274> >> gh <https://github.com/hobson/> twtr <https://twitter.com/hobsonlane> li <https://www.linkedin.com/in/hobsonlane> g+ <http://plus.google.com/+HobsonLane/> so <http://stackoverflow.com/users/623735/hobs> >> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 8:32 AM, Anna Ossowski <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: >> Thank you Hobson! >> >> I just wanted to clarify what our job as the Open Space committee is to make sure we’re all on the same page. Our main job is to facilitate the Open Spaces, which means we make it possible for people to organize their own little Open Spaces by providing rooms, a sign up board, ideas for Open Spaces, general infrastructure, and promotion. Our job is not to organize each little Open Space ourselves. The PyCon attendees will pick a topic, pick a room and a time onsite themselves. Onsite our main job will be to make sure to put up the sign up board everyday, monitor the board and make sure the Open Space topics are CoC appropriate, document the topics, and be there in case of questions. >> >> I hope this clarifies while voting on topics for example is not necessary as the people will sort of make that decision for themselves onsite :) >> >> Have a good week everyone and please feel free to add new cards, assign yourselves to cards, etc. >> >> Anna >> >>> Am 15.01.2016 um 21:46 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com <mailto:hobsonlane@gmail.com>>: >>> >>> Thank you. I may not have been logging on or searching for boards correctly. I see it now, and I added a couple cards. Feel free to edit or delete anything I put up. >>> >>> --Hobson >>> >>> On Jan 15, 2016 6:02 AM, "Anna Ossowski" <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: >>> Hi Hobson, >>> >>> I must have added the wrong Hobson Lane (user name hobsonlane) the first time. That’s strange because I used your email address to find you. Anyway, just readded you under the right user name :) >>> >>> Anna >>>> Am 15.01.2016 um 14:49 schrieb Hobson Lane <hobsonlane(a)gmail.com <mailto:hobsonlane@gmail.com>>: >>>> >>>> Hi Anna, >>>> >>>> I cant find the Open Space trello board under my user name "hobs". Could you re-add me? >>>> >>>> --Hobson >>>> >>>> On Jan 14, 2016 10:20 AM, "Anna Ossowski" <ossanna16(a)gmx.de <mailto:ossanna16@gmx.de>> wrote: >>>> Hello Hobson and Kinga, >>>> >>>> I hope you’re both well! >>>> It’s the new year and PyCon is happening in just a few months. While our main work won’t start until closer to the conference, I just wanted to check in with both of you so we can start planning. >>>> >>>> I just created a Trello board for us, which I added both of you to. If you didn’t get added for some reason, please let me know your Trello name and I’ll add you again. Trello is a great tool for planning and collaboration so I thought it would be useful for us. >>>> >>>> I created 5 boards so far „To Do“, „In Progress“, „Done“, To Contact“, and „Ideas“. Please feel free to create new boards, add cards, or move cards around. I would also like to encourage you to assign yourself to tasks that you would like to tackle. I think the board names are pretty self-explanatory :) When you start working on a task, please just move it to the „In Progress“ board and when it’s done please move it to the „Done“ board. >>>> >>>> My guess is that we should start working on things in March at the latest to have enough time to get everything done before PyCon starts at the end of May but there are things we can start preparing now so feel free to tackle tasks whenever you have time. The only thing we should wait with until closer to PyCon is contacting people. If we contact them too early people might forget about it. >>>> >>>> If you have any questions or need anything, please feel free to contact me anytime :) >>>> >>>> Thank you! >>>> Anna >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> Pycon-openspaces mailing list >>>> Pycon-openspaces(a)python.org <mailto:Pycon-openspaces@python.org> >>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces <https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces> >>> >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Pycon-openspaces mailing list > Pycon-openspaces(a)python.org <mailto:Pycon-openspaces@python.org> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces <https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-openspaces> > > > > > -- > K.Kięczkowska

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Open Spaces planning
by Anna Ossowski 15 Jan '16

15 Jan '16

Hello Hobson and Kinga, I hope you’re both well! It’s the new year and PyCon is happening in just a few months. While our main work won’t start until closer to the conference, I just wanted to check in with both of you so we can start planning. I just created a Trello board for us, which I added both of you to. If you didn’t get added for some reason, please let me know your Trello name and I’ll add you again. Trello is a great tool for planning and collaboration so I thought it would be useful for us. I created 5 boards so far „To Do“, „In Progress“, „Done“, To Contact“, and „Ideas“. Please feel free to create new boards, add cards, or move cards around. I would also like to encourage you to assign yourself to tasks that you would like to tackle. I think the board names are pretty self-explanatory :) When you start working on a task, please just move it to the „In Progress“ board and when it’s done please move it to the „Done“ board. My guess is that we should start working on things in March at the latest to have enough time to get everything done before PyCon starts at the end of May but there are things we can start preparing now so feel free to tackle tasks whenever you have time. The only thing we should wait with until closer to PyCon is contacting people. If we contact them too early people might forget about it. If you have any questions or need anything, please feel free to contact me anytime :) Thank you! Anna

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Pycon-openspaces January 2016