On Mar 16, 9:42 am, Mike Driscoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do you mean the "official" presentations or the lightning talks? I > thought both were kind of bad. Jeff Rush was great in both of the > sessions I saw and the gaming presenters were also good. But I saw a > lot of people who had never presented and were unprepared. In fact, > one didn't have any code whatsoever to share and the other one only > started showing some code during the last 10 minutes of his time.
This was also my first time at PyCon and I thought I'd expand on what Mike said as I feel pretty much the same way. I also want to provide some constructive feedback that can hopefully help improve the next PyCon. I attended all the keynotes, 15 sessions and two days of the lightning talks. I was disappointed with about one-third of the keynotes and sessions. I found only a handful of the lightning talks interesting. My biggest complaint was the lack of preparation of the speaker: * in three cases the presenter had a recent problem with their laptop but had no back-up plan (dead drive, dead power supply, unable to get video out to projector). The presenters didn't have a copy of their presentation elsewhere (thumb drive, or even a printout) so they just winged it and the presentation was difficult to follow and ineffective. When I have presented at conferences in the past, we were required to submit our presentations and materials to the conference at least a week before so they could make them available on a web site and also on backup laptops at the conference. * the PyCon feedback survey doesn't allow for any useful feedback about the presentations. You only get to pick your five favorites. There should be forms available (hardcopy or online) where we can give feedback to the presenters themselves. My impression is that many of the speakers have presented at PyCon before and may do so in the future so this feedback can help them be more effective. I found it a bit ironic that I attended at least three sessions with a strong testing theme that talked about the importance of feedback in the development process and how it helped improve the quality of the final product, yet there was no channel to provide feedback to the presenters themselves. It seemed a glaring omission to me that the PyCon survey had questions about whether I shared a room (who cares?) but not about the quality of the presenters and presentations. * As a PyCon first-timer, I was not aware of the open meetings and BoF discussions while I was there. I feel like I might have missed one of the more valuable parts of the conference simply because I was ignorant. It would have been nice to get the word out a bit more - maybe an announcement each morning at the beginning of the keynotes. * There has been a lot of discussion about the reservation of lightning talk slots to sponsors. What I don't understand is why this wasn't disclosed at the conference. I've seen some of the organizers defend the "experiment" but no one explain why it wasn't mentioned beforehand. I'm left with the impression that the organizers knew this would be unpopular and didn't want to draw attention to it. I think a lot of this could have been averted by disclosing this change before the conference took place (in which case the community may have pushed back and convinced the organizers to reconsider the decision). Or at least it could have been disclosed at the conference so people could have decided to skip the lightning talks and organize their own ad-hoc meetings or talks. Experimenting isn't bad. But failing to disclose this information was a poor decision - especially at a conference that prides itself in openness and community involvement. * Lastly, I found the technical depth at most talks to be too shallow. I was especially surprised at this because I've only been using Python for two years, so I still think I'm a bit of a noob. But if you looked around at the conference, you saw a bunch of people who are really into programming (so much that many of them were doing it _during_ the talks) so to think that the audience isn't capable of following deep technical discussions is a bit off the mark. At other conferences I've attended and/or presented at, they would typically rate presentations as a level 1, 2 or 3. I think this would help set people's expectations. That coupled with session-level feedback, would help the organizers plan future PyCon sessions that better match the attendees' interests. That said, I did learn a few things at PyCon and found the overall experience pretty good. I simply had been hoping for a little more... -Dave -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
