Mailman 3 May 2012 - PyCon-ZA

Sponsor, Speakers and some general ideas
by Graeme Glass June 1, 2012

June 1, 2012

Good day, The company I work for, Go2Africa [1], is keen to sponsor pycon-za. This sponsorship would be in the form of our expertise in helping international and domestic delegates to find appropriate accommodation. Go2Africa would find the best and most cost-effective accommodation, prepare travel plans, and offer travel advice where required. We would also like to offer a fully paid (or seriously discounted) Safari for the keynote speaker. If not fully sponsored, then perhaps pycon-za could pay for the discounted rate as a gift? Then, I trust that you won't mind if I add my 2cents to the planning conversation: In terms of Keynote, I saw that Paul Graham's name was suggested. PG is a fantastic speaker [2], but perhaps consider a speaker who is more involved in core Python development? Tim Peters, Alex Martelli, Raymond Hettinger are all excellent speakers – however, I imagine that the choice all comes down to aligning the speaker with the goal of the conference. I'm sure that these goals include promoting python's use in South African companies and up-skilling people in Python development. I also noticed that you are considering multiple tracks. May I suggest you consider a one-track event, especially for the first Conference? Single-track conferences tend to be easier to organise, and delegates don't have to make difficult choices between the great talks on offer. Have you finalised the venue? See you at CTPUG on Saturday. Have a great day. Best, Graeme [1] http://www.go2africa.com [2] http://blog.metricfire.com/2012/03/paul-graham-consistently-says-um-7-times…

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Pycon ZA Status update
by Neil Muller May 31, 2012

May 31, 2012

Thanks to Simon's hard work, we now have a synmposium instance running at http://za.pycon.org , and we've fixed the dates for the 4th and 5th of October My plan is to poke at how symposium's proposal submission setup works in the near future, and, once that's running, we should send out a call for papers. Ideally, I want everything in place so we can do this shortly after the next CTPUG meeting on the 2nd of June. Currently, my list of groups to spam with the CfP is roughly: UCT (Computer Science & Physics) Stellenbosch AIMS SKA The African Python Tour people CTPUG & the gauteng PUG CLUG (other linux user groups?) Suggestions of good contact people for any of these groups, and other groups to add to the list actively encouraged. -- Neil Muller drnlmuller(a)gmail.com I've got a gmail account. Why haven't I become cool?

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Speaker Suggestion
by Graeme Glass May 30, 2012

May 30, 2012

Greetings, Another person who I would like to see give a talk would be Armin Ronacher. Graeme

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