[Chicago] Outlook Web Access scraper

[Atul Varma]

On 2/10/06, johnnnnnnn <john at phaedrusdeinus.org> wrote:
> My primary concern is that it would 1- encourage people to leave, and
> potentially 2- encourage people to show up late. The problem with those
> two, combined, is that it starts separating the l33t from the n00b in
> ways that are less than welcoming. Maybe i'm being overly egalitarian,
> but i fear that such a situation would make the group as a whole less
> newcomer-friendly.

That's a good point--but my initial reason for suggesting the change
was actually because I felt that there was a pretty big seperation
between "expert"-oriented presentations and "newbie"-oriented ones, in
ways that were rather confusing for newbies (or even people who have
been using Python for a while) and kind of, well, dull for experts (or
even people who have been using Python for a while).

If the group as a whole wants to be more newcomer-friendly, then I'd
suggest that the presentations be done in a way that guarantees that
newbies would have at least *something* interesting to glean from the
presentation.  As it stands, the one ChiPy meeting I went to was
something of a cross, to make an analogy, between an advanced quantum
mechanics lecture and a middle school life sciences class.  I got
really confused by the expert talk (generics) and bored by the newbie
one (the "random" module)--and the third presentation was interesting
in concept but went into way too much detail than was necessary.

Anyhow, I didn't intentionally mean to be harsh there, but I needed to
illustrate a point: I see what johnnnnnnnnn is saying, it just seems
like the only other solution is for the presenters to make their
presentations both accessible and interesting for a wide variety of
audiences, which isn't easy to do.  In other words, either I think
that talks should be given in order from beginner to expert (which is
admittedly a suboptimal solution), or presenters should try their
hardest to break down this distinction between "beginner" and "expert"
and ensure that their presentations are interesting for everyone.

Here's one possibility: why not offer to pre-read presenter's slides? 
With a bit of pre-meeting feedback, presenters could probably appeal
to a wider cross-section of users. I don't know how hard it would be
to find readers, but I'm willing to volunteer.

- Atul