Revision 5 as of 2009-03-30 15:07:11

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Suggestions for 2010

This page should be used as a place to capture the ideas that we don't want to forget to incorporate in 2010 given our fresh perspectives on 2009... so.... list away! (also, feel free to add topics/sections, the list below was just a quick start).

See also: the 2008 list, the Board Game suggestion page.

General

  • 11 rows of chairs in the main ballrooms; is that too many? I never saw them filled, and the result is that most of the audience is far from the speaker. Maybe 6-8 rows instead?

Open Space

  • Have open-space blocks match the conference schedule, not clock hours. (Not sure about this idea...)

Registration Software

  • Faster on-site reg'n; a one-shot form w/o e-mail verification for use on a kiosk, plus an admin page listing the 5-10 most recent reg'ns for printing the badge.
  • PDF badge: add instructions about business cards; better handling of too-long badge names (they were just clipped); specify what's included in the registration barcode; put instructions on card (e.g. 'fold here'); fix ribbon display;
  • Security screen surrounding & behind the kiosk machine. (Poss. use a CC scanner to swipe the card, and make CC field a password field?)
  • Better statistics reporting: add sponsor/comp'd flag and take this into account when counting.
  • Add option to software for 1-day registration.
  • Remove badge-name uniqueness constraint.
  • New-person form: ignore the logged-in user for the info in these fields, e.g. the 'manager' option defaults to checked.

Sponsorship

  • Ted Leung said Sun was sponsoring one of the summits. AMK didn't know anyone was sponsoring the summits, so I didn't thank any sponsors. Ted's a nice guy and didn't really care about that, but it would be nice to get this right if we do summits again.

VM Summit notes

Michael Stone, note-taker at the VM summit, has already privately posted draft notes about the VM summit. Once people have looked them over, they'll be published.

Overall it was a great success; the people I asked all said they got something out of the day and would like to see another one next year.

People gave their initial introductions, and I warned them at 10 minutes, after which most of them stopped in a minute or two. A few people suggested that 15-20 minutes would have been better for intros; e.g. Jim Hugunin suggested that some people were just starting to get interesting when their 10 minutes were up. No one thought the intros were not useful at all. Speakers may need better calibration on what they should talk about; some had very general prologues that probably weren't necessary for this audience.

After the intros, the room broke up into smaller chatting groups. I circulated a bit and they were all talking about VM stuff, not how's-the-weather; Michael's notes also show this.

One day seems about the right length. I asked people if 2 days would have been better and no one liked the prospect; they thought that would be too long.

One projector was enough; after the intros, I never saw anyone using it.

Python Summit notes

Like the VM summit, everyone I talked to thought the summit was a useful event.

The topic-specific sessions worked pretty well. We made actual decisions in many of them, and people seemed interested in all of the topics.

The first, open discussion session was a failure; not many people in the audience had questions and the questions I thought up largely weren't that interesting. Next time we should start with the topic-specific sessions, and conclude with a block of just chatting, like the VM summit did for most of their day.

The room space was very tight -- we requested more chairs and the last arrivals couldn't sit at tables. The room capacity was something like 45; next time a 60-person space will give more elbow room.

There was a communication error about the dinner; we thought it was for summit attendees on one evening, but they were actually A/V team dinners. Let's not do that again. :)

Again, the projector wasn't used very much beyond the intros; the intros would probably have been OK without one.


CategoryPyCon2009 CategoryPyCon

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