PyCon is less than a week away. Where has the time gone?

Registration

Online registration is closed. The full count is not determined yet (due to sponsor passes, financial aid, and a few minor issues) but attendance will be around 850, but could be as high as 900. We had 400 people in ‘06, 600 in ‘07, and bearly broke 1K in ‘08. With the dramatic downturn in the economy and corporations removing all travel and conference expenses, this is astounding! Initially we were planning on about 1200 (plan made back in April last year), and some believed halving that number would be a better estimate not long ago (well I made statements to that effect anyway).

The new registration system this year is fantastic (Granted anything would be better than last years mess). Massimo, Yarkot and Carl really out did them selves. A. M. K., Yarkot, Massimo, Carl, David, and Kurt have done an outstanding job managing all the issues and fielding attendee requests. Early on I was keeping track of issues which poped up on the reg list to make sure someone was taking care of them (but insanely thankful I was not doing it this year). I stopped after 3 weeks as I was just wasting my time. There were a few kinks here and there, but they were minor.

The Schedule

I never did a follow-up on the program committee work, mainly due to time and general program burnout. I think the schedule is fantastic. If you don’t like the way the talks are scheduled, you can blame me. I stole the job from the person whom was doing it and unilaterally put together the schedule you now see. It was a beast of a job. I tried to get the talks placed into tracks. A testing track, a core python track, etc. I also tried to make sure no two talks occuring at the same time would appeal to the same people. I also tried to balance the talk levels to ensure there was something for every level at a given time and that tracks progressed across the conference. That way you could go to a beginner talk on a subject on the morning and be ready for an intermediate talk on teh same subject in the evening or the next day. Against that backdrop there was also the requirement that anyone giving multiple talks would have those talks given on different days. Some speakers have 2 talks, none have more than that, and it is key to only give one core talk a day if you want the quality to be maintained. Also there was the problem of the talk lengths….. My first draft has some glaring errors in it which thankfully other noticed.

Last night I actually made it to the Boston Python Meetup. There 3 PyCon presentations were given and they were… encredible! I am sooo glad I was able to make it. At first I went because I wanted to see the talks so I could see other talks at Pycon during those times. I will be attending Jesse Noller’s talk again at PyCon. I know I will learn more by seeing it a second time, and I learned quite a bit seeing it the first time. The other two talks have already spawned some changes to plans at PyCon which I will hold off on mentioning until I hear back from people.

Audio Visual

I did not mention this is the volunteer post because I did not want it to get lost there. This year Carl has put together an absolutely insane proposal for AV. He has a dedicated staff for managing the AV complete with capture systems (to capture the raw feed going to the projectors), camera operators, a mixer, and an editor doing real-time production!!! If we wanted to put in some extra effort (and a fair amount of cash) we could broadcast live! I would not expect TED level quality, but the samples produced so far are on par with google talks.

Misc

We gave out a mamoth amount in financial aid (don’t have the number from Ted yet). Open Space use is booming. Sprints are picking up speed and people quite fast. It is going to be a very enjoyable PyCon this year!

Question

The PyCon Lab: Solve This! is most likely going to be held as an Open Space this year. How much interest do people have in this? It has not been properly advertised yet. I am not running it this year, but I will try to poke my head in.