Amen on the diamond keynotes and lightning talks. The lightning talks were a great disappointment. Sponsor talks (or any such talks pitched at selling or recruiting) should go in their own, clearly labeled group so those of us who don't care about them can avoid them.
If there must diamond 'keynotes' put them at the end of a session or in a separate track so we can easily avoid them if we wish. But personally, I don't think keynotes should be for sale at all in any form. One problem I faced was that there were sessions that had few talks I was interested in and other that had several at the same time where I couldn't attend all that I was interested. It's likely that there is no good solution to this, but perhaps one could try a new scheme for scheduling talks by posting the talk list early and letting registrants select the top n talks they want to see and running some sort of scheduling optimizer that tries to satisfy most of these desires (I have no idea if anything like this exists anywhere). And if you do decide to change how you handle sponsorship don't be afraid to say publicly how things are going to be different next time. There could well be many who won't go next time (like me) unless they have some reasons to believe that things will be different. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
