[Inpycon] Keynote speaker for PyCon India 2015

[Noufal Ibrahim KV]

On Sat, Apr 18 2015, vijay kumar wrote:

> Any more suggestion before i start approaching suggested keynote speakers.

I think if we're flying someone down, we should consider some people who
are more well known.  I don't want to be misconstrued as being against
Senthil but when you consider that it will cost us the same amount of
money to get him or (say) Alex Gaynor, the latter is who I would vote
for.

Hilary Mason is a good choice. I've contacted her a few times for
earlier events but she's always been busy. In fact, I think last year
was the first year during which I *didn't* contact her. :)

Jessica is a good choice and it would be a good idea, if we decide to
invite her, to do it as early as possible so that there are no
unexpected problems like last year.

I've never heard Lynn speak but I follow her blogs and twitter and am
in favour of inviting her. 

There are a few others that come to mind. 

1. Audrey Roy Greenfeld [1] - She's the co author of the recent Two
   Scoops book. Her contributions are really widespread. Community work,
   tech contributions, documentation, the book. And finally, she's got
   quite a few interests outside of tech. which, in my experience, makes a
   speaker much more interesting.  I've been in touch with her and Danny
   for a while and think that she'd make an ideal keynote speaker.

2. Armin Ronacher [2] - We invited him once before but he couldn't make
   it for personal reasons. I think that was the year Kenneth Reitz came
   down. He'd definitely be a good speaker and his work is well known in
   India where much of Python work is web related.

3. Alex Gaynor [3] - We've never had anyone speaking from the PyPy
   team. Also, like Anand Pillai once said, people like Alex and Armin
   are a newer generation of Python programmers and offer new
   perspectives that the old timers might not have. 

4. Holger Krekel [4] - Holger provided the infrastructure for PyPy
   during it's early days. I know him mostly through his work on py.test
   (my testing tool of choice). I've spoken to him about various things
   over email and in person and have a lot of respect for his ideas.
   A presentation from him about testing technologies in Python or about
   his experiences as an open source consultant based on the toolkit he
   maintains would be good. 

5. Zed Shaw [5] - This is probably atleast a little controversial. I
   actually invited Zed to be the keynote speaker for an earlier event
   (don't remember when) and he had just changed jobs so couldn't
   come. I've spoken to him in person a number of times and listened to
   him in various private interviews and have a really high opinion
   about his level headedness and points of view. His abrassive public
   persona really shadows his actual self which is really great.


I can think of a few more but I think we can get 2 people from this
set. Also, I don't see the need to have 2 keynote slots with a separate
list for each slot. I think we can just pool these folks together and
then discuss amongst ourselves and then invite two of them.

Opinions?

[...]



Footnotes: 
[1]  https://twitter.com/audreyr
[2]  https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko
[3]  https://twitter.com/alex_gaynor
[4]  https://twitter.com/hpk42
[5]  https://twitter.com/zedshaw

-- 
Cordially,
Noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in