Last year, at least for the tastie cornish pies, 'the queue was too long' was a problem. Staggering might help. But it has a potential downside -- people who want to meet 'after the morning talks, before lunch' may end up 30 minutes apart, which means that the early arriver will wait, until sure that the late comer is not coming -- say in 22 minutes. Then the 30 minutes arriving latecomer, who believes, of course that he or she is peftectly on time, waits, and times out on 22 minutes or whatever as well.
Thus if we have staggered lunches, we need to inform people of this, so that they can say to meet at '11:30' and not 'after the last morning session'. >From a scheduling point of view things are not that difficult. Assuming that we have talks on the 30 min, 45 min, (or double that size), then you just make a ragged 30/45 for a one level of break. I actually did that last year to a small extent. Last year we had the problem of too many talks and no good way to reject them, (we had too few, invited late, and got a huge response. It is hard to say to people you asked to fill out the program that the response was so good that this was no longer good enough. I found it morally objectionable to reject the poorest submissions which made the deadline, in favour of better ones we hoped to get after our appeal, and ruled that we should accept those who were on time, unless they were so lame and incompetant that we were not to ... so that when we got such a strong response, well, we just stuffed them all in. I would like fewer talks this year. I think that we are likely to get this by jut accepting those done by the deadline, and not asking for more -- officially, after the deadline .... beating on your friends to submit abstracts before the deadline, is, of course always cool. This will mean that we will miss some cool talks which we would only get if we begged for them after the deadline. But this 'how to work things out' is a thing for us all to decide, not mine as chairman of the society, or me as scheduler of talks. By the way -- every year in Göteborg (Gothenburg) where I live in Sweden there is a Youth Cup in Soccer. The year to come it happens the same week as Europython. (I told you last year it was a bad week for me). This would make no difference, but that a team my father assistant-coaches, in Canada is doing well enough that it is extremely likely that they will be competing -- they are skilled enough, it's whether they can raise the money or get a Canada Council Grant to come compete. The likelihood of this happening seems stuck between 'quite likely' and 'very likely'. If this happens, I will do all I can for EP before the con, but will not be attending it. Hope you all understand, Laura _______________________________________________ Europython-improve mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve
