A social event is anything that isn't strictly technical in nature.
- GPG keysigning BoF
- There will probably be a social event hosted at a local tech bookstore.
Dinner
There should be some place for people to meet up for dinner; without that someone without dinner plans who wants to be social has to hang out awkwardly and make eyes at other people in order to form a dinner group.
Got a protocol suggestion for this? Do we just need a 'Meet for Dinner Here' sign, and some explanation in the conference materials? --amk
Yes, just a sign, maybe a quick announcement at lunch or something. -- IanBicking
Possibly a couple different signs/locations-to-meet for people who may want to go to specific places to eat. -- Ken Whitesell
Just about every major restaurant chain has a store in the area, but they're the same Applebee's and Bennigan's as anyplace else. The Trail Dust is not as close, but is more of a Texas steakhouse. -- PaulMcGuire
Music?
An important thing about a social event is that it really can be social, that means you can meet and talk to people. Meeting and talking to interesting people is one of the most interesting things at such a conference (you could read introductory level papers as html or pdf published to the internet, too).
At some conferences and social events someone thought that there needs to be loud music, making it rather impossible to talk (or rather, to hear what somebody more far away than 40cm from you was saying). For me, this basically destroys a social event, as I will just collect some other annoyed people and leave, searching for a more silent place where one can talk about all sorts of interesting things.
So please: Don't confuse a social event for developers with a disco. If you want to visit a disco or hear loud music, you can do every other day.
Local Pythonista-finder
One of the things we had trouble with in getting a Python Meetup going here in Austin was that everyone is *so* busy. I hope to be pleasantly surprised at all the Texas Pythoneers that show up at a PyCon so close to home, and I expect there might be similar clusters of folks in other locations. Is there any way we could put up a map or two (US/Texas/world) for people to pin their home state/country? -- PaulMcGuire