[Inpycon] Keynote speaker for PyCon India 2015

[sankarshan]

On Mon, May 4, 2015 at 2:49 PM, Deep Sukhwani <deepsukhwani at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I accept the noise part, but here we completely diverted from the actual
> discussion topic resorting to something that doesn't add anything valuable
> to the actual discussion for which a mailing thread was started.
>
> May be a different email thread to just discuss one topic that attracts
> tons of emails of its own would be a better solution in such a scenario
>

And while you may actually be accurate in your observation that there has
been a 'thread drift', further discussions around the meta nature of the
drift does not really help the cause. The original email (way back in this
thread) contained the rationale proposed by the PSSI about the selection of
the keynote speakers. Somewhere in the middle there has been a list of
candidates for the keynotes slots. The listing of the names have brought
forth a discussion about the rationale as well as another point that merits
some form of discussion (in this thread or, a fork). This is the topic of
the speaker being "aware of the local issues".

My take on this is that such a specific criteria really veers towards a
'sock puppet' keynote speaker. These 'local issues' have not (to my
knowledge, and I do read the list frequently) been extensively discussed.
Thus, assuming that a 'local' (or, 'Indian') speaker can parachute in;
identify the issues; propose solutions and in general deliver a rousing
keynote is somewhat of a stretch. I did enjoy keynotes from Kiran and
Kushal - for various specific reasons. But neither of them pretended to be
soothsayers and solace suppliers. It would seem that for 2015 we are
looking at a keynote speaker to make the Indian Python community aware of
the issues and then write out a prescription. This approach is an easy and
somewhat ill-fated one. And the exhausting discussion around selection
criteria makes it sound like the candidates need to meet some checklist of
requirements. It does not honor the current list of candidates who are
worthy of being on stage in their own right and on the strengths of their
contributions. Let's not drag this down to the level of "Oh! (S)he is
speaking because they needed an Indian speaker!". Please, let's not.


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<https://twitter.com/#!/sankarshan>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/inpycon/attachments/20150504/7d017621/attachment-0001.html>