Dear members of the the web2py mailing list. The call for proposals for talks and tutorials at PyCon 2011 is out
http://us.pycon.org/2011/home/ I strongly encourage you to apply. It is a good conference and organized by smart people. Facts you may or may not know: I have personally proposed talks and tutorials in 2008, 2009 and 2010. Unfortunately those proposals have been rejected. Nevertheless, I was invited on a panel discussion, offered a Dojo and I gave a lightening talk in 2009. It is no secret that some of the organizers have been publicly very vocal against web2py on public forums. I think that is unprofessional given their role, but we will ignore that and will continue to defend the technical merits of our work. Despite the odds, if time permits, I will submit a proposal again this year. In 2009 and 2010 we run the PyCon registration pro bono. Yarko and I wrote the software and Yarko volunteered to do the day by day management. It was a lot of work! For 2011 I also offered to help using the web2py (conf2py) but I did not push it because of lack of time. The organizers decided to pay a private company to develop a new conference management system using Django. I am sure they did a good job and I agree there are good reasons to have some aspects of the day by day running of the conference managed professionally (in particular about dealing with money). The bottom line is that this year you will not see "powered by web2py" under the conference registration page. PyCon is organized by the Python Software Foundation and this is form their charter: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a DIVERSE and international community of Python programmers." In the spirit of diversity, I think it is important to continue to respectfully disagree with those who continue to single out web2py and to push for a bigger representation at the conference. Based on google trends, in terms of users, we have the third Python framework after Django and Zope (both of them have been around at least 4 years longer than web2y). Our community is still growing exponentially. We have more than 2000 registered users, more than 1800 distinct visitors/day, and at least 4 web2py based courses in distinct universities. I am sure our interest is the same as that of the organizers: to be inclusive and make the PyCon conference bigger and better than ever. Massimo
