[Inpycon] PyCon 2012 Planning Meeting Notes - 12 March

[Dhananjay Nene]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:58 AM, sankarshan <foss.mailinglists at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 6:40 AM, Navin Kabra <navin at smriti.com> wrote:
>
> > Hence, it is suggested that this time, we should probably have Rs. 400
> early
> > bird (500 later) for students and something like Rs. 1500 early bird
> (1750
> > later) for professionals. The total number of cheap tickets (Rs. 400/500
> > ones) should be capped at a number like 300 or 350, and after those are
> > over, everyone has to buy the more expensive one.
>
> Is there a reason why InPyCon is not looking to charge more for early
> bird tickets both for students and professionals ? For example, 600
> (and, 800 later) for students and, 1800 (and, 2200 later) for
> professionals. I ask this not to challenge the decision but as an
> observation of the ticket prices of various conferences around Pune
> and other cities. A flagship conference around Python, which is what
> I'd like to think InPyCon is, has enough material to justify those
> gate prices.
>
> Again, please feel free to whack the above proposal away.
>
> With students there was a discussion on what constituted a reasonable
amount. End of the day it will boil down to a judgement call. If you ask me
500 is better than 600 from a psychological perspective of what one is
shelling out. With professionals, I am certain we could go much higher
given the quality of content.

Here's how the matter ended where it did (from an approach perspective)


   - We want to ensure that the essential variable costs (primarily lunch,
   T-Shirts & then other miscellaneous items) are taken care of by the gate
   fees.
   - We did want to make sure that we encourage student attendance
   - The thought was that 500 was a good enough amount to be levied from
   students
   - Given last year's expenditure, and adding a bit for inflation, the
   amount could be considered to be Rs. 1000 from a budgeting perspective
   - We started off by looking at Rs. 2000 for professionals, but quickly
   realised that if we capped the student seats to no more than 50% of the
   total seats, then we could actually meet our objectives by fixing the open
   delegate fee to Rs. 1500.

So if you really look at it the driving philosophy we applied was what the
market will bear (for students) and what we need and no more (for open).
I'm certain we could charge more, but not sure if we would like to.

Dhananjay




> > Should we have tutorials on Sunday instead of Friday?
>
> That would probably depend on the intended audience for the tutorials.
> If these are participants who are professionals and are interested in
> attending specific high-end tutorials, keeping them to a weekend will
> probably see a higher chance of them being keen enough to sign up and
> attend.
>
> > Should we have an semi-independent workshop for Python beginners? This
> need
> > not necessarily be "Pycon" branded but the intention is to increase the
> > number of students and beginners who can attend Pycon and get something
> > useful out of it. Should this be on Wed/Thu, so out-of-towners can
> attend,
> > or should it be one or two weekends earlier so that people can attend on
> a
> > weekend. The former will have low attendance due to it being during
> working
> > days; the latter will be appropriate only for Pune local people.
>
> Focusing on the local students may not be a bad idea at all. There's
> much to do at the Pune and suburbs level and organizing a sort of
> 'preparatory' workshop before the event would probably do well.
>
>
I think that should be a focus. We do need to reach out to the colleges and
students and find a way where while primary PyCon sessions reach out
towards the really higher end of what the community is involved with in
terms of Python, we have other ways (not to be mixed with the primary
sessions) by which we reach out to those who are still at the very early
stages of Python.

Dhananjay
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