[Inpycon] Venue suggestion for PyCon India 2015

[Abhaya Agarwal]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Jaseem Abid <jaseemabid at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 5:51 PM, Noufal Ibrahim KV <noufal at nibrahim.net.in>
> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Oct 07 2014, vijay kumar wrote:
>>
>

> Am I the only one who thinks that 60% newbies at a conference is a bad
> thing?
> Are we even thinking about why folks who attended last year didn't come
> this
> year?
>

I was quite surprised at the show of hands during Kushal's keynote. Almost
everyone was a first timer! Unless the growth rate of conference is 30%,
this means around half the folks didn't come back!

The reason why I volunteered for open spaces this year was to make such
>
discussions happen and it sadly eventually led to another whole lot of
> introduction to X and Y, except one or 2 good ones, which I'm happy about.
> We
> had too few talks and discussions about interesting things. I was literally
> craving for someone to come up with a talk like 'Why stackless is bloody
> cool'.
> It didn't happen and I'm sad about it. There was nothing about core python.
> There was no rip python apart session, or 'this simple library you can
> contribute to' session showing code. *In my very humble opinion, that is
> what
> adds real value to conferences, not teaching python to another 1000 folks,
> who
> wont use it themselves ever again*. I'm not making this up, now we are in a
> situation where experienced folks don't come because its too newbie stuff
> and
> newbies don't come because they don't know Python already.
>

Running with the idea of Miniconf, would it help to assign specific themes
or tracks to attract quality talks? For example, Python and Computer
Science. A talk about writing a quine in Python is perhaps elementary but
not something a lot of people are likely to come across on their own. Or a
in depth exploration of the sort algorithm as implemented in standard
library. Something that students can connect to and something that will be
interesting to experts as well.

May be mark one of the parallel sessions as Exploring Python and fill it
with rapid fire 15 min talks which introduce a topic, a area, a lib and
instead of doing examples and basic documentation just provide tons of
pointers. The inspiration here is personal. I got introduced to Pycon when
I came across a talk someone gave on RML - a markup language to generate
PDFs. This can be useful for beginners and others can simply avoid it.


> Quoting Noufal, I'm all in for making "PyCon India [..] an event which is
> for
> advanced high quality talks"
>

I remember receiving this advice about my Pycon talk: if in doubt, make it
more challenging. If the audience cannot keep up, they can always catch up
with you offline but if they feel bored, they are likely to just ignore
everything.

I think we need to apply this advice to the conference as a whole. It needs
to feel more challenging to be engaging and to get people for coming back
for more.

Regards,
Abhaya
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