Proposal for PyCon India

In the spirit of encouraging Python as a language and as developer community, we are planning to conduct a Python conference in India early this coming September. This document is a formal proposal detailing what we wish to achieve, what hurdles we expect to face and how we plan to organise the event. It is a also a request to the Python Software Foundation to recognise our effort as an 'official' pycon similar to the one recently held in Chicago.

Aims

The following is a list of things we intend to achieve by this conference (in no particular order).

Technical

Provide exposure for open source python hackers in India.
Focussing efforts - There are a number of python user groups in India. Some large and some small. This conference will serve as a rallying point for all these groups so that we can work together on something larger than the sum of the parts.
Contributing to the python community as a whole - We intend to make available opportunities for talented programmers to contribute to Python itself and related projects.
Make this an annual event.

Evangelism

Corporate canvassing - We intend to spread information about the language to the corporate world in India so as to encourage use and adoption of the language.
Local event of a global scale - It's not always financially feasible or possible for working class Indian programmers to attend conferences which are held abroad. A large scale conference like this will offer opportunities for such people to get exposure to world class programmers and personalities. It will hence boost their desire and ability to participate in the community
Colleges - To make college students aware of FOSS in general and Python in particular and to encourage them to use it for their work at their colleges.

Hurdles

Organisation - A conference of this scale would require a lot of careful planning, organisation and money. While we intend to take care of the actual work and details by ourselves, guidance from the PSF on how these events are conducted in general would be extremely valuable.
Sponsorship - There are a number of companies (some international and some local) in India which use Python. An incomplete list is available here. We plan to create a persuasive sponsorship kit and visit these organisations for funding.
Advertising - A conference is not a conference without participants. We plan to maintain a website for the whole effort with podcasts and downloads of all materials presented. The site will be used for advertising the event before it actually happens. In addition to this, we plan to put advertisements in the large number Indian open source and technical magazines to publicise the event. Announcements of the event will also be planned in the companies which we approach for sponsorship.
Participation - We need to aggressively contact people willing to present papers from around the world and from India. Without a decent number of high

quality presentations lined up, the event will suffer. This is one of the reasons why we wish to use the PyCon brand name to promote the conference.

Suggestions

For future events (maybe 2010/11(?))
Alternatively PyCon-India could be held multiple times in a year, in each city which finds enough volunteers (read critical mass) to get

such an event going.

South Americans hold a day long event for Libre software across 20 cities simultaneously. This is a Libre software event and not a Python-only event. Some scalability issues across Indian cities may arise.

Plans

Date. We have planned to hold this event during the first week of September 2009. Tentatively 4th-6th September 2009.
Venue. Bangalore
Seeking Sponsors. For e.g, from Google, HP, ThoughtWorks

CategoryPyConIndia2009