[EuroPython] The new volunteers

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Thu, 16 Oct 2003 13:16:48 +0200, Martijn Faassen writes:
>Laura Creighton wrote:
>> How about run a business track that isn't aimed at 'hackers who want
>> to have a business', but rather business opportunities, commecial
>> partnerships, financial whatnot instead.  Then there won't be as
>> much overlap, and I can go invite businesses so we can impress them
>> as to why they should switch to Python?
>
>What we need are a few examples of talks on each track. And of course
>motivated track chairs for each track. Then we should be able to determin
>e
>whether each track is viable.
>
>It might be useful to study the talks on particularly the business
>track as well as the lightning talks of the two previous conferences, to
>see how they would be split up into two tracks.
>
>Regards,
>
>Martijn

I didn't envision doing talks so much like we had at past EuroPython, but
rather like talks I gave years ago at Open Source conferences in the USA.
What we would do is to invite a bunch of people from government and
business to our 2 day conference.  (this was only for them, so, clearly
we would have to make some changes to suit EP).  On day 1, we would
take some requests from the audience.  things that they wanted solved
in their lives.  We claimed that we could give them an open source solution.

We'd post this up in the first talk, and let the people with problems
explain a bit about what they wanted.  Then a bunch of hackers would get
on it, and code away for the 2 days long.  The rest of us would give talks on
the benefits of open source, and the philosophy of open source, and 
short presentations of Python, Perl, Apache, GCC ... whatever we thought they
would find useful.  Why Open source is good for government security.
Why having the code available ends your dependence on your software
vendor.  yap yap yap, all the good stuff.  And we would keep posting
the progress of the hacker teams who were making the stuff ordered.

At the end of the 2 days we would hand them their solution.  This impressed
the heck out of them, and make them take Open Source seriously, which is
what we wanted.  Some of the hackers got contracts, too, which is what
they wanted.

Now clearly we cannot structure EP that way -- for one thing, the hackers
would have to miss the con to write code, but maybe we invite such business
people to a day before the con meeting and proselytising effort?

Just thinking out loud, here...

Laura