Hey,
On 04/15/2014 10:33 PM, Horst Gutmann wrote:
> Every conference I've attended so far had at least on or two time
> slots each day where none of the talks appealed to me and so I went
> to explore the city or just got some sleep at the hotel. This way the
> event stayed fresh and exciting to me and I didn't feel bad for
> skipping some talks if I simply didn't feel like it. That naturally
> only works to a certain extend and eventually I just want to get out
> of the conference again.
I guess that's one way to deal with it (especially in Florence!). But I
wonder whether that's a way to cope with a problem: should there be time
slots at a conference with 3 or 4 or more parallel tracks where none of
the talks appeal to an attendee? Of course you can't please everyone,
but if it happens to a lot of people you might have a problem.
When I'm at a conference I tend to want to focus on it. At the third day
of a three day conference I typically notice I am getting tired. I'm
glad that lightning talks tend to be slotted in then at EuroPython,
because that's always a nice variety of things.
Then there's the potential issue of people who simply don't have time
(or resources) to go to a conference of that length. They can of course
attend it for a couple of days, but people may instead elect to go to a
shorter conference instead where they can have the full experience. It's
hard to get a feel for that though; EuroPython certainly has been
growing in attendance, so that's an argument against that.
[snip]
> 5 days is a really long
> time, so perhaps the orgas and the EPS would be willing to experiment
> here with the format a little bit I the future? :-)
It seems to have been a slow change.
From the beginning in 2002, it had been a 3 day conference; in
Charleroi, in Gothenburg, in 2006 at CERN and in 2007 and 2008 in
Vilnius there was a 3 day conference too.
In 2009 in Birmingham there were 3 main conference days, plus 3 tutorial
days before it. This might be the introduction of the tutorial days;
it's possible there were tutorial days at some previous EuroPython, but
certainly not all the time -- I find it hard to google up the schedules now.
I misremember EuroPython 2010 in Birmingham (the last time I attended);
I thought it was like 2009, but best I can find now it had 4 days of
main conference, plus two days of tutorials in the weekend before it.
But I cannot Google up the time table so I'm not 100% sure.
I can find an announcement from 2010/11/18 for the conference in 2011
where the tentative schedule was 2 tutorial days with 4 conference days,
the same as in 2010 in Birmingham. Then the dates were shifted
(2011/02/17) to have everything from monday to friday (5 days, talk days
in parallel with tutorial).
Since I last attended in 2010 and actually forgot it was 4 days in
Birmingham and was used to 3 day conferences before it, the 5 day
massive schedule looked rather sudden, but it was not.
Each new format was a reasonable small change from the format of the
year before. Each change had a motivation, but I wonder whether the
final effect was entirely intentional.
Regards,
Martijn
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