This was my first PyCon as well. I had heard glowing recommendations about the lightning talks (from Bruce) previously, and I was really looking forward to them. I, too, was disappointed.
I help to organize a community based conference, and we have struggled with providing value for sponsors as well. I have some suggestions, which I will offer here and to PyCon organizers. This sounds similar to what one person described above, regarding how lightning talks were managed in '07. At CodeMash, we scheduled a daily slot for vendor sessions and clearly marked them as such. We were concerned that attendees would simply avoid the vendor sessions, which would backfire. To mitigate this risk, we strongly encouraged our vendors to do something "different" than a sales pitch for vendor sessions, asking them to consider providing something meaningful for the audience. Talks weren't reviewed; we just gave them a nudge when we discussed the vendor sessions with them. They were entitled to choose a pure sales pitch if they wanted to do so, but we definitely discouraged this activity. And the sponsors responded with some great talks, and expressed satisfaction in the entire process! The vendor sessions were well attended, and it was completely transparent that they WERE vendor sessions. I had been totally skeptical about providing vendor sessions ahead of time, yet even *I* was won over. Vendors WANT people to come to their sessions. Sometimes they, just like speakers, simply need a little nudge in recognizing what makes a compelling talk. In my opinion, other speakers suffered from not knowing what makes a compelling talk as well. I don't know what other talks were proposed, but those that were on the schedule were often disappointing because the speaker provided too much "background" and not enough "here's what's cool" for me. Those were the talks that I walked out of. I suffer from this same problem as a speaker and I'm trying to fix that myself. I hope that other speakers are interested in doing the same. As for the attitude that if you weren't involved with organizing Pycon, you can't complain about it, that's a bit unfair. Several people DID engage in the conference onsite, organizing Open Spaces discussions (Bruce included). I saw Bruce both suggesting Open Spaces talks and being recruited to convene them (and, in one case, even reconvene one that had taken place earlier). That's being involved in the process, and should not be discounted. Furthermore, in my experience, people don't usually complain about things that don't matter to them. It's important, IMO, to recognize that the complaints you see on this group seem to come from the heart, from a desire to see PyCon flourish and be a conference worth attending. I certainly feel that way, and I suspect that the vast majority of people who have offered constructive criticism here do as well. I'm bummed about the lightning talks at PyCon from 2008, but I have a lot of confidence based on what I have read here from Jacob and others, that things will be different in 2009. Thank you for listening to the community feedback. -- Dianne -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
