[Inpycon] suggestions for PyCon India

[॥ स्वक्ष ॥]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 22:16, David Goodger <goodger at python.org> wrote:
> [I found this in my email drafts folder; thought I'd sent it long ago.
> Hopefully it isn't stale ;-) ]
>
> Hi all,
>
> I had a great time in Bangalore, and I was impressed by the size & scope of
> PyCon India in only its second year. I have some suggestions based on my
> experience organizing the US PyCon over the years. Some have already been
> mentioned here (I know I heard some discussed).

Thanks for the same.


> * Speakers and MC's should feel free to defer questions to the end of a
> talk, especially if the questioner is insistent.

True, when the speakers encourage questions in the middle of his/her
talk, it encourages tangential discussions (or even trolls) which
prevents the speaker from completing their talk, or rushing through
the remaining bits and/or borrowing a few moments from the next talk.
Any of these will throw the schedule out of gear and the audience
feels cheated out of listening to a technical talk. I'd suggest the
hall marshall/oderators (folks managing the hall?) should have powers
to enforce some discipline incase they notice that the speaker is
unable to manage the audience, enforce time limits. Another
alternative is to keep one mike in the middle of the hall, all the
audience members with questions can stand in a queue to get their
queries cleared. This will hopefully reduce one person hogging the
speaker all to themselves.


> * These kinds of instructions for speakers can be printed up ahead of time,
> and given to speakers and MCs. If you're interested, I can get the
> instruction sheet from US PyCon.

Could they be added to the pycon wiki or on wiki.python.org? I can
help if needed.


> * For North American conferences, as you grow in attendance, costs go up
> per-person (you have to move from free space to hotels or conference
> centers). If this is true in India as well, you may consider holding
> multiple regional conferences instead of one national conference. It's not
> ideal, but it's one way to keep costs down.

Commercial spaces are very expensive in India too. Smaller
confs/unconf distributed around the year makes more fiscal sense and
increases the people reach for those folks who  may be busy and/or
cannot travel to a main conf in the metros.



> * I noticed a large drop-off in attendance between Saturday and Sunday. It
> seems to have happened last year as well. Why is that?

Not sure why exactly but this is something I've seen happen at
bangalore-barcamp (a free unconf) too. Saturdays is a workday so
people tend to go out more(?).


-- 
vid ॥ http://svaksha.com ॥