On Mar 16, 4:10 am, Bruce Eckel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If the following seems unnecessarily harsh, it was even more harsh for > me to discover that the time and money I had spent to get to my > favorite conference had been sold to vendors, presenting me as a > captive audience they could pitch to.
My thoughts: * Saturday and Sunday were much better than Friday. * Open-source != Anti-vendor. The vendors are a vital part of the open-source community. * Lightning talks should be proportionate to their information content. The most common vendor message can be done in 45 seconds while the next speaker is setting-up: "Hi, I'm Raymond from Raymond Enterprises. We sell Raymond's signature to Raymond's fans. We use Python to crawl the web for clients wanting his signature. We're hiring Python programmers with experience in web-crawling. We're proud to sponsor for PyCon 2009. Good night and good luck.". * The sole guiding principle for the conference should be whatever best serves the attendees. * As the conference gets bigger, lots of previously minor annoyances will become more irritating. The conference organizers will adapt as needed. * Vendor/sponsor presentations should not have priority over informational talks. Also, lots of things went well: * Sean stepped-in and fixed-up the wireless for Saturday and Sunday (but on Friday the third-party wireless setup sucked mightily). * The conference admin (checkin, schedule posting, etc) was excellent. * The AV work was great (you'll soon be able to see HD recordings for most talks). * Steve Holden successfully created a new type of talk, "Teach me Twisted". * The feedback on the tutorials was excellent, the BoFs seemed to go well, and the sprints are off to a nice start. * The conference was close to the airport. One last thought: * Most of the conference work is done by volunteers. As the community grows, more volunteers will be needed (for next year, I plan to help by reviewing talk proposals). Raymond -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
