[Inpycon] Draft of the CFP and Proposed Dates for the Talks

Kiran Jonnalagadda jace at pobox.com
Fri Jun 22 11:22:38 CEST 2012


Anand and Anand,

Couple of points on this:

1. Funnel does not display everything that is asked. For instance, email is
not shown at all. There's a JSON feed at /<event>/json, which has an email
field which is always blank unless the user is logged in as an admin.

You could easily add a mobile number field. I skipped this because I was
hoping to have users add a mobile number in LastUser, get it verified, and
have that picked up by Funnel. TRAI's anti-spam rules last year basically
killed the SMS industry, shutting down all providers through which one
could send a verification code.

Funnel doesn't have an (unverified) mobile number field because I was
trying to do it the proper way and external conditions made it unviable,
and I got frustrated and set it aside.

You should just add the mobile field and apply the same logic used for the
email field.

2. On the speaking/proposing divide:

I took the standpoint that if someone is far too busy to submit their own
proposal, they'll probably outsource their talk as well. We wanted folks
who were more interested in engaging with the community than being on
stage, so Funnel initially only allowed submitting for yourself.

Then I noticed people submitting proposals saying they'd like to attend a
talk on the proposed topic, not to speak themselves. They were hoping
someone would notice and offer to take it up.

I implemented this by splitting the proposer/speaker record on the
proposal. They could be the same person or different persons. The idea was
that anyone interested in speaking could leave a comment saying so, and if
their comment got enough votes, the proposer could nominate them as the
speaker.

The UI for accepting someone as a speaker never got implemented.

I've learnt from watching it over a few events that this approach has
problems. The nominated speaker did not write the proposal and cannot edit
it. They may have different ideas for how to present on the topic, but
those ideas don't come through.

It's better if the speaker submits their own proposal, linking to the
original as the reference. This bit isn't implemented either, but it's part
of the new codebase we're writing for http://hacknight.in.

For PyCon, I'll recommend just removing that option. You just have to
remove one field from the form and two lines of logic in the view.

Kiran


On Fri, Jun 22, 2012 at 2:29 PM, Anand Chitipothu <anandology at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hope it works. Maybe you can look for mobile numbers in the form
> > validation code by looking for regexes and allow submission only
> > if one is found ?
>
> I agree that it would be good ask for mobile number, but considering
> the amount of work involved in adding a new field to the form, I
> suggest going ahead with the work around.
>
> Also I don't think it is a good idea to ask people to put their mobile
> number in the fields displayed publicly.
>
> >> The talk sumission form has been improved by HasGeek over time from
> >> experience of running many conferences. Unless there is a strong
> >> reason, I would prefer to continue with that form.
> >
> >
> > Good Point. However, this is one more conference that is using the form,
> > and as they have improved it with experience, I think any feedback here
> > is valid as well in improving the form, correct ?  It is not correct to
> take
> > the approach that this is set in stone and be not open to comments.
>
> Sorry, if I sounded like that. It was not my intention to under-value
> the experience of PyCon India and the form improvements that we've
> done over years.
>
> Keeping the time involved in making customizations to the form, I
> would try to avoid adding any new fields. Removing or reordering
> fields is not that hard.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/inpycon/attachments/20120622/0455da50/attachment.html>


More information about the Inpycon mailing list