This page is for use by PyCon organizers to to record learning experiences from this year's conference, and to remember things that we could do better next time. Crosslinked to ["PyConDC2004Aftermath"] which might be the same thing with a less negative name.

A postmortem IRC session is scheduled for 1PM EST, Friday April 2nd.

Please record "concrete successes" in PyCon2004Successes. Start another page for "concrete failures" if needed? -- specifically not just negative feedback, but things that absolutely didn't work out.

Statistics

Pre-registered numbers: 340 attendees.

43 badges were never picked up. Some (10?) of these were for "Keynote Guests" added after registration, and therefore unpaid.

18 paid registrations on-site.

Ideas for next time

• When registering users, get permission to send them status e-mail (or to put them on a mailing list).
• When accepting proposals, request that users put their

  presentations under one of the [http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] licenses, as [http://zak.greant.com/archives/000622.html the MySQL conference has done.]

• Put Lightning Talk sessions (one or two of them) in the program.
• Need more time between sessions

• Do feedback forms on the web (Shane McChesney's company [http://nooro.com/index.html Nooro.com])

• Schedule first day of Open Space before conference -- first day had hardly any Open Space going
• Put conference before sprint
• Have Sprints before and after the conference
• Make conference four days and sprint three days; last day of conference gears up for sprint
• Do we need to use pycon.org?

I found having two copies of information irritating, and the limited number of people who could update the pages was a bottleneck at times. Could we use the existing pydotorg CVS instead? --amk

I'd rather use a Wiki whenever possible, or some system where people don't have to ask to update pages -- lac

• Make sure that early bird registration deadline ends *after* all the papers have been accepted and the schedule has been created and posted for people to see.
• Having the catering table in the back of the keynote room may not be a good idea; it's noisy when the staff refreshes the table in the middle of a talk.

Tasks for next time

• Steve will chair one more conference; we need to arrange the succession for

  PyCon 2006. Perhaps having a vice-chair closely involved in next year's planning process would be optimal.

• Finish off and polish the conference software so that next year it doesn't have to be developed as capabilities are needed; having to do this resulting in our missing several promised deadlines and pushing things too close to the conference date.

  (AMK will do this. Please record ideas on [http://www.amk.ca/ng-arch/ConferenceSWIdeas this Wiki page], and join [http://www.amk.ca/mailman/listinfo/conf the conf mailing list] for discussion.)