On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Miles Van Pelt <[email protected]> wrote: > There was discussion last night about northwest python day and in the name > of progress, we made some decisions so that we could continue to move > forward. > > We decided that being a relatively small precursor to Pycon seemed to be a > significant factor in last year's success, and as such, we thought it made > sense to us to try to keep the format as similar as possible to last year. > > -One room on a saturday in mid January, ~1 month before PyCon (Jan9, Jan16, > or Jan23). > > -We keep registration limited to a similar size as last year. > > -We encourage people giving talks at PyCon to present as a chance to > warmup/prepare for Pycon. > > -6-8 Half our talks > > -1-2 lightning talk sections > > > Justin said that he would look into getting the same room as last year, > which should be more comfortable given that we now know that we can > reconfigure the room to let people into the middle of the circle. > > One of the main improvements that Justin suggested, having talked to some of > last year's attendants, is that instead of simply turning away presenters > once we have enough, was that we review talks by requiring a short paragraph > abstract. The idea being that we keep talks more widely interesting, and > less domain specific. Thinks like general tools, or "this is what I learned > when writing this piece of software", or generally interesting projects. > > I know that there was talk of trying to have multiple rooms, but this > complicates things in a number of ways. The least of which being that it > would be impractical, or impossible to do this at UW. > > Also, there has been talk of maybe having space for sprints, and we felt > that it made more sense to do this on the following Sunday. If there's > enough interest, Justin said he'd be willing to book a couple of smaller > rooms for the Sunday after the talks. > > Now, if anyone else has ideas as to what to do next, this is the forum. Last > year I wasn't much involved at all with organizing things, but I'm sure some > key things started happening right around now.
That all sounds good. We have a head start if we don't need to look for a different space. I think we had 65 or so last year, so let's try to configure the room for at least 100 and see if we can get a larger turnout. What's the official room capacity? James Thiele offered to coordinate the talks again, so take it away James. He had some new ideas for this year although I can't remember them exactly. But I think the initial talk proposals will still go on the wiki. Lightning talks at the beginning and end has worked well at PyCon. So let's start filling in some jobs: - venue: Justin Cappos - talks: James Thiele - overall schedule: Mike Orr - supplies/food/nametags: Mike Orr - coffee: ? - web page (info, talks link, sprints link): ? - invitations/marketing: ? - sprints: ? For the sprints, I'd suggest a wiki page for topics, and tentatively reserving two rooms. If we have a few potential topics by December's meeting, we can confirm the rooms. -- Mike Orr <[email protected]>
