[EuroPython] Work on Call for Participation for EuroPython 2015 has started

[Paul Boddie]

On Sunday 2. February 2014 02.09.04 Hynek Schlawack wrote:
> >> It’s quite the contrary: the current organizers were criticized for
> >> their current work they do and I tried to explain that romanticism about
> >> a conference in 2007 isn’t helping, that it’s great to have at least
> >> one big European Python conference, they are hard to do, and to the end:
> >> let them do their thing.
> > 
> > I'm not criticising the current organisers.
> 
> FWIW, my original reply didn't go to you either.

Your original reply went to the list. When you presumably did reply directly 
to me at one point, I got two separate messages: one to me and one via the 
list. What was that all about? Do we have to wait for two messages from you - 
one public, one private - to have permission to respond?

If you want to criticise people in public for what they have said and to 
misrepresent their position, you have to accept that other people will have 
something to say about it.

> The mail *I* replied to said it would be a good thing *for the conference*
> to get smaller because we could fly in people from South America and those
> people are more interesting anyway.

Since the record of what people said is public - and yes, I actually quoted 
your mail in response to Jacob's mail - people can make up their own minds 
about what was really meant, which I seriously doubt is what you are claiming.

> That are *completely* different concerns from what you're bringing up and I
> find it highly irritating to be confronted with pot metaphors based on that
> derailment.

What's a "pot metaphor" here exactly? Why might someone sensibly advocate a 
limit on attendees without having some kind of "elitist" agenda? Oh, that's 
right, I already explained why: a $100/person loss on a thousand person 
conference is pretty convincing; maybe it really does have something to do 
with that after all.

This kind of thing is what irritates me hugely about the so-called Python 
community and why, as I've explained to a few people before now, I've diverted 
a lot of my time to other initiatives instead. You have people who have made 
substantial investments of their own time and resources into establishing 
something that benefits others, and what you often get in response is sniping 
about some hidden agenda or how people could have done more or better.

It's like the mainstream subculture around Python has made some kind of virtue 
out of getting people to work for free so that people can pretend to be those 
people's boss and think they have the right to demand things from them. This 
pervades the so-called community from top to bottom and in almost every 
regard. Whereas other initiatives and communities offer appreciation for any 
contribution, with a "thank you" for having done anything at all, the apparent 
norm in the Python scene is to tell people that they didn't do enough or that 
what they did was inferior to what should have been done, or that it wasn't 
licensed according to "community expectations" (where they get to sell your 
work in a binary and send you the bug reports), replacing "thank" with another 
word of choice, in effect.

Christian wrote that "ANY organization having volunteers work for them should 
be extremely humble for having anyone spend their spare time for them."

Well, without accusing any organisation of anything, I think the so-called 
community as a whole should re-evaluate how it treats people who offer their 
time and resources to benefit everyone else.

Paul