[Inpycon] [pythonpune] Re: Announcing PyCon Pune 2017 & Call for Volunteers

[Kushal Das]

Hi,

To begin, let me apologize for the delay in response - I was traveling
and wanted to take time to respond to this without escalating this
further.

The idea of having a PyCon in Pune started in July, before PyCon
India in Delhi when Chandan sent an email to the local mailing list about
hosting PyCon India in Pune next year.  The email did not see a lot of
responses and the thread died more or less as soon as it started.  We
(Chandan, Sayan, etc.) followed up that idea in Delhi and during those
discussions people (including those from PSF) reminded us that there
was absolutely no problem with doing more than one PyCon in one
country, and that was encouraging.  The idea of having more than one
Python event in a year also seemed great because it meant we did not
have to wait till September next year to meet again.  The idea seemed
great for another reason - we could have a slightly different focus
for this PyCon, with the possibility of hosting developer sprints that
will allow local developers to work with contributors to key Open
Source projects like Django, CPython, etc.

To see if this idea was even possible we reached out to some key
contributors early to see if they could join us.  In parallel Chandan
sent out a call for volunteers in which he specifically mentioned that
an organizing committee would be formed out of the volunteer group.
He also sent out communication about the website initial draft and
later the CfP.

We have had almost 100 volunteers so far, some of whom have even
started sending pull requests for the website design.  I can't see
what additional communication is necessary to urge those who have
refused to sign up as volunteers, to get them to join us.

That said, we would love to hear constructive feedback (that does not
involve calling people 'shameless' or other names) and would like to
know what else we can do to make the local community feel more
involved if they already aren't.  One idea is to send out a summary
every week following our meetings for those who are unable to attend.
We also have #pyconpune channel on Freenode server (IRC), where we
are having live conversation among volunteers.

Kushal