[Baypiggies] Thoughts on the commercial talks at BayPiggies meetings?

[William Deegan]

Jeff,


On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 2:36 PM, Jeff Fischer <jeffrey.fischer at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>  As you may know, I have been helping Glen with hosting the BayPiggies
> talks this year. In planning the speakers for the rest of the year, we ran
> into some questions about what kinds of talks people want to see.
>
>  Since Python is part of a larger Open Source ecosystem, most talks focus
> on how to use various Python-based open source libraries to achieve
> something useful. For example, Dan's talk last month incorporated NumPy,
> Pandas, and Scikit-learn. Other talks may be about commercial products
> built around an Open Source offering (e.g. a past talk on Ansible
> <https://www.ansible.com/> and an upcoming talk on RockStor
> <http://rockstor.com/>).
>
> So, what about purely commercial offerings?
>

As in there's nothing in the whole talk which is generically python and/or
free or useful without paying money?
Perhaps limit the length of such to 5-10 minutes?
And/or require a donation to the beer fund? (or whatever might be
appropriate)

Also I suppose it would be wise to check with our meeting site hosts what's
ok with them.

If you have to pay to use an API, are you still interested?
>
Yes. (assuming the scope is not terribly narrow)


> What about APIs to pay-to-use web services (say, the Boto API to Amazon's
> Web Services)?
>
Yes.


> Should we focus on Open Source or cast our net wider?
>

Pragmatically, depends if we can fill our schedule with pure open source..


> Where should we draw the line?
>

Maybe the following would be a good way to deal with this:
1) If it's pure open source: yes
2) If it's open source implementation to call a general purpose (buy pay
for API) like AWS, openstack, twilio, parse : Yes
3) Anything else: Float it to the group?

Typically this isn't a last minute thing, so there'd be time to say:
"Hey Joanne Smith from ACME want's to come talk about their down API for
tracking roadrunners via satellite imaging, does that sound interesting?"
(Or do a poll of some sort google forms? to gather the up/down vote if
+1/-1 email responses aren't sufficient.  Does meetup support something
like this?)


> Does it depend on the specific topic or speaker?
>


> Whether the API is available to individuals or just corporations?
>
> Personally, I am somewhat conflicted: I think we should welcome all kinds
> of speakers, but I would not want to see us degenerate into another meetup
> that is just pitches from Product Managers.
>

Ditto... Needs to have technical content, and prefer at least some Python
content.

-Bill
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