Other comments

How can we improve PyCon next year?

Have lightning talk speakers sign up for lightning talks in advance, and have people vote on the lightning talks on the first day or so, so it gets a little more condensed? OTOH that kinda defeats the purpose of lightning talks. Just an idea.

Having the Open Space schedule available online would have been very convenient. Although I realize that budget is a concern, if possible, it would be nice to have something quick and easy available at breakfast time both for convenience and to foster socializing in the mornings before the Keynotes.

Serve breakfast. Meals in some sort of hall with better table arrangement for eating and socializing during meals. More visible vendor tables.

Coffee available 1st thing in the morning!!!! Have speakers show something other than slides. Far too many presentations consisted of nothing but slides.

At the moment, I'm too ecstatic about this one to have any criticism in mind. I'll get back on this one.

more wireless bandwidth, more vendors,

See if you can get Guido to dress up in the BDFL costume from Monty Python

Make sure hotel guests are not relocated. Better snacks. More tutorial days/options. Free WiFi in hotel room

Perhaps better sound? Also, I got *VERY* annoyed at people constantly coming in late to every single talk. It really disrupted things. It was very aggravating and very rude.

Wireless network -- was very difficult on Friday, but got better on Saturday and Sunday (thankfully). I still think soup + 600 geeks with laptops is a bad idea. I don't like having Guido's keynote during lunch; this is really the one unmissable talk of the entire conference, and it simply takes too long to get people out of the rooms and into line, through the line, and back into the ballroom in time for his talk. Further, his keynote usually expands to either fill or slightly surpass the time available, so starting a little late because of the lunch logistics means that the schedule of other presentations later in the day is impacted. (Although the session chairs did a VERY good job of getting everything back on track quickly, many kudos to them.) Make sure the hotel contract doesn't allow the hotel to shuffle people to other hotels after they've already had reservations okayed by the main venue. Were the chairs and tables designed to punish my back for sins of a past life? I developed terrible back pains very quickly. They don't seem well- suited to laptop use.

Cluster the jython presentations on one day, and similarly the IronPython ones. Need to get more AV staff - perhaps ask for volunteers early, like session chairs? Would be nice to have optional short bios of people on the PyCon site coming prior to coming, so that newbies (and others) can identify people that they'd perhaps like to meet with, rather than depend on hit-and-miss... clearly not an issue for old hands.

Not sure. You are already doing a great job.

Increase available bandwidth.

Better network access (more bandwidth, access points, etc). Knowing that the B/G radios were going to be cranked down so low would have been nice to know ahead of time (to get an A card). Maybe that was an on the spot decision though. A single pre-convention email with various tips about what to bring/be prepared for/other last minute announcements would be nice. Maybe the week before the convention.

The pycon website could be better.

Some of the talks seemed to be too basic, it would be nice to have some more advanced talks (I know it's hard to please everyone). This also may be due to how much time they have to spend on their talk, and it is difficult to hit much during that time.

I found the food at the hotel to be less than satisfying, and the talks this year were generally less useful to me than last year, because I felt that they were mostly too shallow in what they covered. I also missed several talks that conflicted with other talks I would like to attend. I would prefer only 2 tracks, rather than three, and I would like there to be fewer keynotes and more long/advanced talks that can go into increased depth.

Select the accepted talks earlier. Add speaker name in schedule. Survey attendees about talk interest before fixing the original schedule. Consider a variable number of parallel tracks (i.e. not always 3). Group the talks a bit better around themes. For example, there could have been 4 talks in a row about Python in Education running in parallel with talks about Python web frameworks - as these two topics likely have little overlap in terms of attendees interest. Make it possible for attendees to give feedback anonymously by email to speakers about their talk.

More lightning talks.

Group topics to dig deeper; more BOFs (Best practices - For example, a linked series of testing talks - Unit testing, nose for running a series of unit tests, load testing, etc. Multiplatform programming - Apple, windows, palm, nokia. Use the same program and get it to run on as many systems as possible.)

Schedule more time for lightning talks. They were very entertaining and informative! I also think a continental breakfast would be nice.

It is difficult to be gone over the weekend.

The tutorials were terrific. If I were to attend next year I would probably attend two days of tutorials (given the right topics were offered). The talks were not long enough. It seemed that the talks were long enough for the inexperienced speaker to get themselves into trouble but too short for any real depth. Lightning talks serve the purpose of brief overviews and status reports. The talks should go deeper.

1) more lightning talks 2) keep the web schedule updated with the write-in Bof/open space sessions 3) can you require presentation materials before the talk (or at least some early version of them) to help decide which ones to attend? 4) Name badges should have indicated what location and/or company people are coming from 5) Maybe before keynotes, during lunches or any other periods of inactivity, you can run a slideshow loop. use previous pycon photos and allow people to submit photos before hand (example, screenshots of people's projects, allow anything python related). allows people to be creative and not necessarily have to give a lightning talk to get their word out.

More breaks with fruit or vegetable trays for snacks. Nuts are good, too. Not so much the fruit bars.

Ned Batchelder's suggestion: Allow people to list URLs, projects, talks, or companies that they are associated with. Annotate name tags with that info. Similarly, maybe a who's who book with that info.

*WARMER* rooms...PyCon should not be a huge fridge

Bigger event rooms. More information on the given talks. Hard to note what you want to see with 5-10 lines. Enforce people to post their slides beforehand. Better evening event organisation, was a shambles trying to find out what was happening and when.

9AM without coffee & muffins was rough. 5 minutes between talks was good; back to back is tough. Longer supper break? No supper break? Provide some dinner? Two lightning talk tracks, separated by subject? I was happy with PyCon coverage. However I ran into several other system admins who use Python. They may be a fairly small group though.

Consider organizing the talks into categories (or maybe even tracks in the schedule) such as: 1. Case studies of Python use (e.g. education) 2. Intros to Python applications (e.g. Trac, Django) 3. The Python language and dev/dist tools 4. Fringe/new ideas, projects in their infancy

Begin call for papers much sooner, specifically targeting more technical papers, in-depth talks that give code demonstrations.

Overall, the organization of the event exceeded my expectations. 1. Eliminate the 'How Python is helping to change the XYZ industry' talks. These are usually the most boring. On the rare occasions they might have something interesting to offer, they can't release project source. OTOH, these talks help narrow down my personal selection process. 2. Maybe have a separate internet channel for the speaker's computers. Or inform them not to expect a reliable connection.

We need more room!! A great problem to have. There were times when people were eating lunch on the floor. It would also be nice to have easier access to the schedule; perhaps either projected somewhere or on overhead monitors.

Overall I think it was very well run. If the board for posting for open-space/BOF meetings could somehow be online, that'd be awesome - although I can see where it'd be a fair amount of work.

Screen the keynotes better... Scrap the tote bag

maybe have a 'network sync-up' session after registration, with some network experts to help get connected. my machine connected flawlessly, but i saw several people spend the first day of tutorials trying to get connected to the network. also, i thought Guido's presentation was a bit too long for an all-comers event. the summary of coming python features could have been cut to 30 minutes. Finally, do *not* schedule any kind of speaking engagement during lunch.

contract someone (hotel or other) to install/remove power outlets

- Wider hallways (or less tables in them) to avoid traffic jams

- More advanced talks. This doesn't necessarily mean code, it can mean more algorithms, deeper concepts, etc.

- Shorter days (even if it means one more day) - I was completely wiped out by Sunday afternoon the last couple of years - to the point of having trouble paying attention. This would also give more time for socializing and/or experimenting with the things being presented.

Keep up the Lightning Talks - there were great! Better screen the content of the talks - a good number of the presentations sucked. Either the presentor was horrible or the material so basic and pointless that the whole presentation seemed to be a waste. Stress to speakers that the talk should be more than informative, less hype. Also, slides and slides of code are pointless. IPython and DSL talks were good. Trac talk was disappointing. Scaling web sites talk was very good, nice way to demo their point.

Tiny matter, but restock refreshments through out the day (and conference). Marriott frequently doesn't do a good job of this, based on other conferences I've attended. But that's a tiny suggestion. I thought it was great conference.

Hold event at a hotel in or very close to downtown so it's easier to get around (bus,subway, CHEAP taxi rates)
Consider Canada (Cheap, still speak English mostly)
Don't hold in Texas

Well, it does need to be in a bigger venue. The halls were getting pretty crowded.

The shorter lightning talks were the bomb. You could just run lightning talks around the clock and it would rock.

Not necessarily in order: - The food was average at best. - 30 minute sessions do not allow the speakers to get into the topics with enough detail. I'd propose moving to a 45 min and 1 hr format instead of the 30 min and 45 min format. There were several time slots where I was not interested in any of the 3 options, and only a couple where I was interested in multiple talks that were scheduled at the same time. This might indicate that you could have 4 or 5 tracks with the longer time slots and do better. Repeating the most attended sessions a couple of times should address the matter of the most popular talks being crowded. The halls were too narrow for the number of people attending the conference. There was constant crowding during breaks, and while waiting to enter the next session. Require the speakers to post their presentation material to the PyCon site a few days before the conference. I'm still waiting to get copies of several of the presentations, especially the Keynotes! A separate area for the vendors, and a few more vendors might make that aspect of the conference better for attendees and the vendors. Being crowded into an already cramped hall had to be difficult for them, and definitely reduced their traffic.

Keep the lightning talks as a peer to the Keynotes, and at the end as a plenery. Try to keep the tracks in chunks... for example, this year IronPython was split up. No more than three tracks. Keep all non- track options to the evening... maybe preschedule some of the BOFs rather than just Open Spacing everything. Relative to room use, this year was much better than last year. Mesquite seemed more roomy than the ones across the hall from the main room, maybe just ceiling height, and having those smaller rooms across the hall was better. Keep that in mind for future venue room allocation. VERY WELL DONE!!

I would like to see a list of the lightning talks presenters posted on the conference site. These talks are often useful for links, and knowing how to contact the presenter would be useful.

Put attendee organizations on the badges.

Give BOFs more prominence and make them easier to attend. See if you can figure out scheduling preferences in a live way like you did this year but even better so as to know how to allocate rooms. That guy who does xkcd has neat algorithms for this, doesn't he?

Schedule more free time in between each talk and in general. Have more special events like OSCON - city tours, photo tours, bookstore trips, etc. This helps connect people over stuff other than Python.

Have breakfast & coffee available in the morning

Is it possible for potential attendees to 'vote' ahead of time on the talks they would like to see? could help avoid high-demand talks being at same time.

The food should be available for a longer time. It seems like the food was put away too early.

Take lightning talks back to what they really represent, rather than some vendor ad-spot. Make sure they are 5 minutes or less. Better scheduling of tracks - too many times graphics or game talks were scheduled against each other. Or pure language talks (eg. pypy vs. python-dev)

1) Many of the presentations I attended could have been given in a lightning talk. This would hopefully force those with poor presentation skills to work on their presentations more, instead of appearing that they had not done so at all. Preparing for a presentation is certainly more than preparing PowerPoint. 2) Allow more time for keynotes! The r0ml keynote especially -- I could have listened to him all day. Have a break time maybe -- allow the keynote speaker to continue for those who are digging the speaker, allow other talks to go on at the same time after this break time. 3) Along with number 1 -- possibly more time for lightning talks? Some 5 minutes, others 10 minutes. Reserve one room for lightning talks (introductions to things) while other, longer talks are going on. A lot of the talks I attended were introductions to a library/application/framework/etc. I could have read the website in less time than it took the presenters to present the material they had. An introduction is an introduction. Keep it short. Reserve the longer talks (30-45 minutes) for more in depth information of the topic.

Allow for repeats of 'Best Of' at the end. Had to miss a few of the sessions I heard really good things about. Try to restrict session speakers to people who have a visible history with the topics they are speaking on. Two of the keynotes were similar, would prefer more variety.

Invite better keynoters (r0ml rocked, but the rest kinda sucked)

More room for walking around. Wireless access in the rooms

Better hotel.

Personally I'd prefer more focus on uses for Python other than web apps and database frontends. There were only a few talks having to do with scientific computing with python, which is what I use it for.

I don't have much to give here. This was my first PyCon and I absolutely loved every second of it. Everything worked out perfectly. If the conference was one day longer with talks that would have been very cool! Well, the Internet connection worked very well for me. I never had a dropped signal. The throughput wasn't great, but for the number of computers it was handling I didn't mind one bit. But improving the amount of bandwidth would be nice, but only if you are able too.

Please find a venue w. free wifi in the rooms. Perhaps find a way to record video directly from presenters' machines, instead of having to videotape dimly lit projection screens?

Improve and integrate various apps (registration, speakers, sponsorship). Add social features with mashups to LinkedIn and similar sites (I'll be talking with Doug about this).

Definitely work on the network problem. It really wasn't that bad but at times you couldn't do anything. I would really liked to have had slides available for many of the talks. I know it's not feasible in many cases but it really helps to be able to follow along when a speaker is not exactly experienced in public speaking and/or I am sitting in the back row behind someone that is tall.

Make sure all speakers understand the importance of making their talks high-content. The thing I look for in a presentation is detailed content and/or opinion based on a common experience and/or a demo that gives me a new tool that I can use. The worst are 'experience' talks. I went to some talks (unicode was the worst) that were just sort of unfiltered 'experience' which to me speaks of a lazy presenter. Your experience should lead you to conclusions, should include a summary of possible solutions to your problems, and useful reasons why you chose one option over the other.

The thing appears to be growing a lot - be prepared for a crowd (~ 700 people), but continue to promote it so as not to get burned should people not get word and not show. A bit reactionary - but pull keynote subjects back towards Python and Python apps.

Plan fewer talks with more time between them.

Provide small reading lights at podiums for talks for the speaker. Manage Job openings better.

The food was not very good this year. The most important thing would be to start each day with coffee. I had to buy coffee before the keynotes because there was none available. People who drink coffee like to drink it first thing in the morning. I'd like to see a more regular schedule. It was very hard to keep track of what was going on when, because talks started at odd times like 4:40pm. If the schedule had a more regular runtime, e.g. starting talks on the half-hour, then it would be easier to remember when they start and easier to find the talks I wanted to attend. There were some unfortunate scheduling conflicts. The python-dev panel was opposite the PyPy talk; most of the panelists mentioned that they wanted to do to that talk. A cool technical solution would be to post the schedule early and get people to pick N talks they want to attend (say N=10?). The pick a schedule that minimizes those conflicts. I'd say the python-dev panel and the PyPy talk were two of my top five choices.

keep a higher temperature in the conference rooms -- it was warm outside and freezing inside, why?
give a longer dinner break (1.5 hours?) because it was difficult to get back to the evening activities on time
have a schedule application like the main one for the bofs and other such activities

The conf. net access was great. It'd be nice to find a hotel that had access in the rooms too. I'd also to be closer to the airports.

Better wireless support.

A little more filtering of Lightning talks would be good, otherwise it was wonderful.

Faster internet! (I bet all the guys say that).

I haven't seen any videos of the talks, but I'm sure it can always be done better.

Have a bit more insight to the hotel. It seemed as though you lot were struggling to fill the rooms to meet the quota. However the opposite seemed to be the case. There seemed to be a cut off of 01 Feb that appeared mid-Feb (however, it is possible that I missed it). It would also be nice to pick a place that has better public tranportation - Denver has a bus (RTD) that runs from the airport to Downtown for $6.00 and $1.00 for a transfer. Things to keep costs down would not go amiss.

Don't have people eat in the same rooms used for the talks, or if they do, tell them to clean up after themselves.

Bring back Robert Lefkovitz for another keynote!!! Better wireless (of course). More lightning talk sessions. More clothing for sale. Better indication in hallways of when talks are starting & ending. Get more visibility for user groups, and for Python activity outside the US. Maybe ask earlier for user group/international talks, lightning talks, etc. Have a panel on how the Python community can support user groups: the Python advocacy talk mentioned how a small $$ investment in user groups can go a long way. Summary reports of Open Space achievements/ideas. I found out about the 'Things Python can borrow from other languages' results only because I happened to come across a blog posting.

Network - see about a Squid proxy or some sort of streaming proxy (http-replicator comes to mind). I'd be willing to manually fiddle with routes/proxy settings to go around my vpn if I could get a locally-cached version of something. Food - if restaurants are so readily available as this year, I don't see a problem with having a lunch or two on your own. Although I would like some sort of breakfast goodies, even if it's just muffins and bagels. The food area was packed and there was no time to mingle... which is why I suggest offsite on your own lunches to lessen the crowds. The schedule (for me at least) put several talks I was interested in across from each other. Maybe mix it up a little bit so 'Writing your own python types in C' and 'Python, unicode, and internationalization' aren't at the same time. Or SQLAlchemy and 'Scaling python'. The website was also kind of... hmm, it'd be great if we had a schedule that _didn't_ have the mouseover things, or at least cached them when you load the page so it doesn't require constant connectivity (yes I'm volunteering to help). Overall I thought it was a great conference, and I'll be back next year. Keep the lightning talks -- if I had to pick my favorites I'd say Guido's keynote and the lightning talks because the people were conversational.

a) avoid refuse(food) cluttering-up tables b) discourage people from entering sessions late as that is distracting. and/or oil the hinges on the doors. c) discourage/prevent talk overruns. Makes people late for other talks and delays start of next talk in the same room. d) Try use both screens if two available (e.g. the lightning talks) e) More central location (e..g access to town)

- Better sound, most speakers sounded distant - Make it a day longer and make the sessions a little longer. - Get rid of the tote bags, put everything on a USB key, no paper waste - No slogans on tshirts, please, make them business friendly - Breakfasts! Skip the snacks, give us breakfast!

Session chairs for all sessions and videos of all talks would be good.

The snacks ran out very quickly. If you ran to the restroom, you went hungry. Provide a restaurant guide like http://www.schneier.com/restaurants-rsa2006.pdf ... ok, it doesn't have to be /that/ good, but a basic guide would be really nice. (Hmm... sell ad space? Oooo... you should get tummy.com to sponsor it! ) Assuming solid wireless, a softcopy would be enough. The events schedule page looked really nice, but was hard to use in Konqueror; the detail boxes disappear when you try to access the links in them.

- PROVIDE BREAKFAST!!!!!!!!!!!! - Choose a location that does not have snow and where temperatures are significantly above freezing. - Choose a venue that has adequate space. This year was too crowded.

Do some extra analysis of who wants to attend what talk and try to avoid double-scheduling.

Better organized lightning talks Less recruiting, or less blatant recruiting at least.

Shorten keynotes by 15 minutes. Add 1 more session to day Better open session room management

More organizing of PyEdu activities: at least a BoF.

Add a Squid Proxy server with some very fast Disk I/O, and at least two caching only DNS servers. This could be a huge performance increase.

I miss the printed slides offering you did last year.

Better separation of material into tracks.

Hard to imagine -- this has been the best conference I have attended in 22 years.

Well, I stayed there very briefly and unfortunately cannot really recommend anything about improving pycon.

The may not apply for next year. But in Dallas, most people left the hotel for dinner. But the dinner break was only one hour. Although I need to eat, I also didn't want to miss the evening activities (OLPC, python lab, etc.)). I would be okay with boxed dinners if you want to eat quickly. Or I'd be okay if dinner was two hours. Something to drink during breakfast, specifically coffee and iced tea. More orange juice. It was consistently gone by people who listened to the keynote in the hallway. Very irritating.

Higher visibility of Birds Of Feather and other general talks.

This was a really awesome conference. It would have been really cool to have the open space board closer to the registration desk. The wireless was OK, but could be bette, and #pycon should have been advertised with specific instructions.