Good evening, everyone! I am finally caught up after my whirlwind of holiday travel, and am now happily ensconced at home for the winter where I can now keep abreast of things and watch the weather forecast for snowstorms.
In no particular order, here are some responses to all of the great ideas that you have generated on this thread over the past week:
- I like the idea of having Guidebook make people aware of the Open Spaces! I am not exactly sure how that would fit into the app because I do not have enough experience of it to have a clear idea of how its navigation works, but I am happy that your committee will be looking into where Open Spaces will fit.
- A blog post is a great idea! We should aim for fairly close to the conference, since Open Spaces can't be scheduled far in advance — last year we did an April blog post, and that feels about right for this year as well.
- I agree that the printed schedule this year should somehow, if room permits, show that the Open Spaces happen in parallel with the talks. When we design the brochure, we'll show you the result and let you know whether it wound up fitting. And using the printed schedule will, I agree, be a more feasible approach than trying to have the registration people deliver the information to people who are busy registering and probably wouldn't absorb it anyway.
- Open Spaces can indeed continue during sprints; I have no problem with them overlapping.
- I agree that attendees need an introduction to the conference, and that the introduction should introduce Open Spaces! Last year I tried mentioning Open Spaces in my half-hour introduction to the conference, designed to let people know how to get the most out of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckW1xuGVpug
Fast forward to about 19:00 for the segment on Open Spaces. For 2017, I hope to do something similar, because I think that a reminder of everything that goes on at the conference is good for everyone, not just the smaller self-selected audience we would get if we only gave this information at a for-beginners event.
Please let me know how the Open Spaces segment can be improved to provide more context and to better situate them in attendees' minds as things that go on at the same time as the main talks schedule.
- I did wish last year that there was someone, or a group of volunteers instead of just one, who would tweet 15 minutes before every hour about what Open Spaces are happening. “Coming up in 15 minutes, Open Spaces on: Astronomy; SciPy; Hardware; Diversity” or something like that, based on walking by the board and reading the cards. I am not sure whether subscribers wlil want to hear N tweets about the N events per hour, and I am not sure that organizers will want to have to issue a tweet about their event (do they all even have Twitter?) in addition to getting a card up on the board. But I am not going to insist on any particular approach; there are lots of ways that Twitter and the Open Spaces could interact, and as long as it doesn't involve lots of tweets from the main conference Twitter account, I'm happy to have y'all on the committee experiment with whatever idea interests you most.
- I am not sure we should add a blank Open Spaces schedule to the Schedule drop-down on the site. (1) It would make organizers think they can sign up ahead of time, but they can't. (2) People would see it blank in the days before the conference and conclude that something was wrong, or that Open Spaces weren't really going to happen, because generally conferences only have schedule grids up because they have data to put in them.
I will, however, definitely plan to re-post my https://us.pycon.org/2016/events/ “Overview” page again this year as we release the schedule and, as you can see, it (probably similarly to what you were thinking about the printed brochure?) depicts the Open Spaces as happening simultaneously with the Talks.
- The problem with a Twitter hashtag is that people might think they're supposed to subscribe to it if they're interested in Open Spaces, but you can't control the amount of abuse that is delivered by people who figure that out, because Twitter doesn't let you control what's tweeted under a hashtag.
There, I think that covers the main points that have been raised so far? Feel free to make further comments on any of these matters, and I'll try to respond with a much shorter ping time now that I'm home and back in the loop! Thanks again for all of your thoughtful work to make Open Spaces ever more awesome. :)