[EuroPython] 'business day' and misc organizational comments

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

I'd like to put in a few arguments against separating between a 
'business day' and some 'hacker days'. I think it is much better to
have mixed parallel tracks that appeal to different segments in the 
audience throughout the three days. Some of these, like keynotes and
lightning talks, are interesting to a broad audience, while others, like
BoFs, are interesting only to a very small set of the audience. 
I think by balancing them well we can have the success we had last year
and then some.

My impression of the audience (and I don't think I am alone) was that 
we had a lot of people from small businesses there; it was certainly not
all hackers in some large corporation under layers of middle managers, which
is the audience Eric Raymond tried to target in his keynote. :)

Also from the poll Tim Couper did it didn't seem as people were displeased
with last year's conference at all; this mix of businesspeople and hackers
apparently liked it. I think this is a good formula and let's 
continue with this route. We can handle this by organizing the right
simultaneous tracks so everybody has something interesting going on at
all times.

If you really are targetting business people who are not at all interested
in the technology, I think another event may be in order, like for instance
a trade show (not a conference). If we are interested in people who use
Python that are in business as well, I think we did rather well last
year from the comments I got. And we had a founding Python Business Forum
meeting that was well attended.

If we drop the 'business day' idea I imagine this impacts the proposed
pricing schemes. I don't think we have to be in a complete rush to
decide this *right now*. While we were pushing it late last year we 
had a good conference, and we don't have registration schemes online
right now. People who are making hotel reservations now shouldn't influence
a sound decision making process -- I'm glad they're so enthusiastic but
it's not like we have to bend backwards to get stuff going in full steam
*now*. Let's work out the details of the tracks and the speakers; we
then have something good to go public with.

Regards,

Martijn