PyCon Preliminary Program Announced!

[Tim Peters]

[Bryan]
> can anyone tell me how the talks work?  there are between 9
> and 12 talks for each time slot.  do all talks start at the same
> time? or are there just four talks at a time and the columns show
> what talks are in a given room?

The web page needs better formatting.  In general, there are no more
than 3 presentations going on at any given time, each presentation is
scheduled for 30 minutes (including setup time, teardown time, and Q&A
time), and all (up to 3) talks in a given time slot begin and end at
the same time.  All the talks in a given column in a given time block
occur in the same room, and these are generally 1.5 hour blocks (so 3
30-minute presentations per block, and up to 3 concurrent blocks).

> is it easy to go to the talks you want?

I'd say it's impossible when you want to attend two or three
presentations occurring at the same time.  Otherwise, yes, it's easy
-- all the presentation rooms are on the same floor in the same
building.  The program committee spent a lot of time trying to group
"similar" presentations into blocks, so that there's a good chance
someone (and especially a "one-issue" person) can sit in the same room
for 1.5 hours and hear what they want to hear.  That can't work for
everyone simultaneously, though, and some amount of room-switching
during blocks is unavoidable.

I don't care much for "parallel tracks" myself, because I want to hear
basically everything.  But we had more proposals of higher quality
this year than ever before, so it came down to scheduling more talks
in parallel than ever before too, or rejecting perfectly good
proposals.  Because of time constraints, we had to reject some good
proposals despite having 3 concurrent presentation tracks, and adding
(compared to last year) an additional 6-talk block on Wednesday.

It looks to be another great PyCon!