There is a discussion going on regarding how long the presentations should be for PyCon 2006. In the past the sessions have been 20 minutes of talk, 5 minutes of questions and 5 minutes to change rooms, grouped into 90-minute timeslots, with a 30-minute break btw each 90-minutes.
There were comments last year that that 20-minutes was too short to cover much material, so there is a push to extend that to 50-minutes of talk, 5 minutes Q/A and 5 minutes to change rooms. Some however think sitting in a lecture for that long is excessive and that 20-minutes is sufficient to cover the high points of a topic and point interested people to online docs and forums. Others, particularly those new to a topic, hunger for more comprehensive coverage, something more akin to a class or tutorial. They may not be familiar with a topic and want more than a bullet list of what has changed on the project since the last PyCon. Note that there -will- be a day of tutorial prior to the main presentation days, but will that one day satisfy those people? And there is a view of mixing session lengths, dividing talks into "topic surveys (whats)" and "tutorials (hows)", with perhaps a survey to introduce a topic, say the Twisted Framework, and then on another track an in-depth session to actually teach Twisted programming. There is concern, however, that such mixing can complicate scheduling excessively. We would also like input from speakers themselves. This year some seemed uncomfortable or surprised to find they only had 20-minutes of actual presentation time. But not every talk needs more time. In 2006, there will be more speaking rooms available, in that the sprinting rooms will be available during the entire conference. Therefore there will be rooms for the usual tracks 1, 2 and 3, plus the 2 sprinting rooms, plus a non-sprinting "quiet" room. However, the idea of having possibly 5-6 tracks makes some parties believe too many choices will leave attendees unhappy. Others that our community is diverse and needs to support people with different presentation needs. If you have strong opinions about these matters, please send private email to either me ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and/or the PyCon chairman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) and we'll summarize to the group, or join the pycon-organizers list and get involved directly: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-organizers Please read the archives to come up to speed on the various viewpoints. -Jeff Rush -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
