Revision 14 as of 2007-03-16 10:58:59

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Book Monday 9th of July to Wednesday 11th of July 2007 in your calendar! EuroPython 2007, the European Python and Zope Conference, will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania. Last year's conference was a great success, featuring a variety of tracks, amazing lightning talks and inspiring keynotes. But with your participation, we can make EuroPython 2007, the sixth EuroPython, even more successful than the previous five.

This year we have decided to borrow a few good ideas from PyCon. The first idea is to move away from the 'track' structure. Instead, speakers are invited to submit presentations about anything they have done with Python that they think would be of interest to the Python community. We will then group them into related groups and schedule them in the space available. In the past, Europython participants have found the following themes to be of interest:

In addition to talks, we will also accept full paper submissions about any of the above themes. The Call for Refereed Papers will be posted shortly.

As usual we will be holding Lightning Talks. A Lightning Talk is a very short talk -- five minutes maximum -- scheduled one after another. You can fit 10 of them in a 60 minute session. There is no approval process: speakers merely sign up at the door. Topics are often up-and-coming Python projects, cool hacks, things you wish were different, recruitment for a new Sprint based on an idea you just had, war stories, and amusing mistakes. If a topic is boring, or incomprehensible, don't worry, it will be over in five minutes!

The second idea we have borrowed from PyCon -- and from the Agile 2006 and XP 2006 conferences -- is Open Space. Open Space provides a structured way to realise the main benefits of attending a conference: breaking down barriers between special interest groups and encouraging the sharing of experiences with other attendees. An Open Space is an area reserved for informal presentations, talks, demonstrations and discussions. Like Lightning talks, Open Space is not planned in advance. But unlike Lightning Talks, Open Space is not plenary, has a much more generous time limit. One could use it to:

After the conference (from Thursday 12th July to Saturday 14th July) we will, as usual be holding Sprints: sessions of collaborative development focused on creating or improving software projects, documentation, and other materials. A sprint is a two-or-three day focused development session, in which a small group of developers pair off together in a room and focus on solving a particular problem or building a particular subsystem. This gets the team focused around clear (and challenging) goals while working collarobatively. Not only do is this a great way of getting results, but also a great way to get new people aquinted with the codebase, and disseminate knowledge withing the team. Perhaps most important -- it's fun!

To propose a sprint, or see what sprints are already proposed, visit http://www.python.org/moin/EuroPython2007Sprints .

To propose a presentation, go to http://indico.cern.ch/abstractSubmission.py?confId=13919

For more general information on the conference, please visit:

Looking forward to seeing what you fine folk have been up to, the EuroPython Team

Discussion:

I used the word presentation rather than talk, because some people's talks are more like demos. As long as we don't get 'This is my company. Here is my product. Buy me.' I am fine with this. If others are not, change presentation back to talk.

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