Details

• Venue: ThoughtWorks, 2nd floor, Tower C, Diamond District, Airport Road, Bangalore (opp TGIF, Near Indira Nagar 100 FT flyover).

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• Time: 3pm to 5pm on 03 May 2009

Agenda

• Discuss PyCon India

Participants

• Anand Chitipothu
• Sriram Narayanan
• Harish Mallipeddi
• Anand B Pillai
• S Ramdas
• Senthil Kumaran
• Ravi Shankar

Summary

Attendees

Anand B Pillai, Anand C, Harish M, Ravi Shankar, Senthil Kumaran, Sriram Narayan, S Ramdas.

Minutes

We discussed the venue, the format, the cost aspects, organizing committee etc. The meeting lasted from around 3.30pm to 5.15pm.

A few decisions were made regarding the venue, the format, the dates, the question of sponsorship etc. These are summarized below.

• It was tentatively decided to hold PyCon India as a 2-day event on Sep 26-27. Fallback dates in case of any clash with other events are the previous 2 week-ends of Sep 12-13 and Sep 19-20.

• All the attendees unequivocally voiced their support for IISc as the primary choice of the venue. The reasons are that of branding, recognition, history and contacts (and food availability). Other venues discussed were St.Joseph's College and TATA Audi.

• The event will be conducted aegis PyCon India, a new society which we will register in the coming 2 months. This was seen to ease the tasks of receiving sponsorship money and to maintain finances and reporting.

• We agreed to have a top-level PyCon India core group who will help the executive committee to get things done and work at an advisory level. This group will perform tasks like society registration, international branding/marketing etc. The conference will not use the BangPypers name in marketing but will use the "PyCon India" name.

• We agreed to have a central organizing (executive) committee in charge of executing the event. We agreed to have Noufal Ibrahim to lead the executive committee. We need to select the remaining members of this committee. This committee would have around 3 members.
• Sponsorship from companies using Python is essential for the event to succeed. We

discussed this and created a list of 1st level (companies working solely in Python and have a deep interest in the language) and 2nd level (companies using Python among other technologies) in Bangalore and Chennai who we would approach for sponsorship.

• It was agreed that we should create a separate "Pycon India" organizers mailing list and a PyCon India website in the next 2-3 weeks. The mailing list would be invite only and open only to co-ordinators/volunteers of PyCon India. The BangPypers mailing list would be used to discuss general topics of the event and to get grass-roots support for the PyCon.

• We agreed for a follow-up meeting 2 weeks later, i.e on May 17th at the same place (TW).

Here are the tasks that the participants have assigned to themselves for the next 2 weeks.

• Anand B Pillai - PyCon India organizers mailing list and registration of PyCon India website.

• Anand C - Work IISc contacts and find out about the details in getting the venue for 2 days, also enquire the logistics of food arrangements.

• Ramdas S - Ground work for setting up PyCon India website working with Kenneth Gonsalves + Initial investigation of registering PyCon India as society.

• Senthil Kumaran - Advertise PyCon India with user group mailing lists, do the initial grass-roots activity

• Everyone - Work contacts in companies using Python to spread the word and find out about sponsorships & internal Python projects which they want to demo.