[Inpycon] Collated feedback

[Balachandran Sivakumar]

Hi,

     First, congrats to the organisers of Pycon India, for pulling it
off, given that we had a late start this year, with the venue shifting
to Bangalore and all that. And we had really nice key note speakers.
Both the presentations were good.

     Thanks to Noufal for this mail. It is a nice summary of the over
all mood. I would like to add a few of my suggestions.

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 1:37 PM, Noufal Ibrahim <noufal at nibrahim.net.in> wrote:
>
>
> - OTOH, maybe it is sensible to avoid tutorials all together. 3 days is
>   harrowing for everybody and the separate registrations and stuff makes
>   it quite hard.
>

         I would like to have tutorials(though I couldn't attend them
this year due to unavoidable reasons). This where people new to python
pick things up. But, here is what I would suggest. We should do the
CfP by around April, and announce the selected proposals by around
mid-July. We can use the  intervening time to do rigorous rounds of
selection - including asking the presenter to show a non-trivial
working example of his talk(and it should not be picked from the
tool's tutorial page). This is just a suggestion



>
> 5. Poor talk quality - This was by far the biggest complaint. Following
>    are some suggestions.
>

      This was felt by a lot of people. We felt that some of the
presenters were actually disinterested. May be their organisation
asked them to give a talk ? Again, talks should not be blind
theoretical data, picked from various web sites. These are a few
things that we should take into account.

       Probably, we need to ask people to upload their complete
material, including slides and code, and with more volunteers review
the content, at least a month before the event. I agree that we need a
lot more man power for this. But we will do our best.

> - One hour is too long for a talk and gives people time to ramble. 30
>   minutes of talk plus 10 or 15 minutes of questions. If it takes more
>   than that, it's covering too much.
>
        May be like the US pycon, we can have longer sessions, in
which lengthy discussions can be organised. For eg., someone
explaining the ZTK may not be able to cover up a lot of things in a
diligent way within 1 hour.

> - CFP and selection done *much* earlier with a larger review
>   committee. Perhaps with multiple meetings of members (over IRC). We'll
>   have to take into consideration the bio of the presenter and get a
>   little brutal with selection.
>

    Yes :) About April beginning, and close it by first week of May.
After selecting the proposals, allow uploads of presentation material
till middle of June. And do further checks on that ? Will that be
possible if we have an expert panel of volunteers ?

>
> 6. Too tight a schedule - No sufficient gap between talk slots.
>
> - We should keep 5 (or even 10) minutes of "free time" between slots and
>   mercilessly enforce this.
>
     Yes, by the time we move out of a hall and get into the next, the
speaker has already finished the intent and purpose of the talk.

Thanks again to the organisers for making it a good event. We will do
our best to improve the event further :)

-- 
Thank you
Balachandran Sivakumar

Arise Awake and stop not till the goal is reached.
                                                             - Swami Vivekananda

Mail: benignbala at gmail.com
Blog: http://benignbala.wordpress.com/