Dougma (dŭg·mə) n.

Sarah learned to walk by herself for the first time today by holding onto a toy stroller. Kim was lucky to have her camera on hand at the time. (How do you rotate video on OSX? YouTube doesn’t have this as an edit option?)

Figures I was sitting on the couch when I read this instead of at work, or in the computer room, or.. well anywhere else in the house. That meant I had a choice of grabbing highlights (which counts as a magazine…) and leave me reaching over and putting my hand on the book next to me (there is always a book within arms reach in my house.. just not always mine).

“I’m feeling right bad about this.”

From Death of a Dreamer by M.C. Beaton.

Meme from James Tauber, Greg Newman, Justin Lilly and Brian Rosner:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Just to drive the point home, this is a picture of the half wall behind the couch looking into the kitchen:

50 points to whom ever knows what 'orts' are... (no googling...)

1 hour per frame, 24 frames per second, 1 second per day, 40 days.

High res avi is here (14Meg).

Just wanted to give a status update to all those who are wondering what is going on with the PyCon US 2009 program committee.

We have recieved 109 proposals. (NOTE: there is now a dynamic image URL so you can embed the above graph in your blog! You need to right click as it uses  redirect.)

This number is lower than last year, but that is to be expected. Why? Because:

1. We did not advertise like last year (where we actually paid for professional help to get the call for proposals announced all over the place).
2. We did not announce it in popular IRC channels like in past years
3. We started collecting proposals later than last year
4. We had a much shorter submission period this year (even before last years extension)
5. We did not extend the submission period like we did last year
6. We did not put out regular announcements of the deadline approaching like we did last year
7. There have been a TON of new regional and international python conferences this year
8. The economy?

Seriously, I am shocked that given all that, we still got the number of proposals we did. I am also ecstatic to say that we have 39 reviewers from a broad cross section of the python community. We also have a number of invited speakers. These speakers were selected from the feedback forms from previous years and from general feedback from the greater community. The organizers and the Program Committee reviewed feedback from 08 (the surveys, blog posts, reddit, and mailing lists, IRC logs, etc) in an attempt to discover what things worked last year, the things which did not, and how to do better.

So what is happening now?

The program committee is activly commenting on and reviewing the proposals. At the time of my writting this, there have been 170 comments. We use comments to communicate with the authors for clarifications and to suggest changes. Authors can still edit their proposals and we are working towards reaching a critical mass. As of this post there are only 132 reviews written. That number will grow to well over 400 before we are done. That is a monumantal effort for the program committee, and it is just the tip of the iceburg.

What happens after that?

Once the comment period is over, the PC will will head into the home stretch for reviewing. The proposals will be made read only and the PC will make final review edits, and ensure that there are no proposals which are under reviewed. That is where the fun begins; if you consider trying to get 40 people to all agree on anything fun. I won’t bother rehashing how that happens without thing degrading into chaos except to say that should not given the processes used.

What do you think so far?

There has been quite a bit of discussion on the pycon-pc list on how reviews should be written, how best to communicate issues with the authors via comments, and how to manage the PC effort. Even though the core of the process is stable, every year it is different. One complaint last year was that there was not enough transparency with this process. I have tried to address some of this in blog posts, etc. and this is part of said effort. One missing element is early public discussion on the PC from submitters, reviewers, and the general community. So lets start some of that right now.

If you are so inclined please leave a comment on this post on your thoughts about the process thus far. Please mention if you are a reviewer or proposal author for this year, for a previous year, a past PyCon US attendee, or just someone in the general community.

There are some very strong opinions out there, so please do not get upset just because you don’t agree with someone elses opinion and please keep it civil.

UPDATE: Yes the registration system had issues, we are talking about the program committee. No, authors were not hidden from the reviewers last year, that is a myth I have attempted to debunk time and again. Yes, we all know the sponsor lightning talks were a mistake, that horse is pulp; I will delete any comments brining that up. Same goes for any comments with profanity. *sigh*