Re: conference length

Hey,

On 04/15/2014 10:33 PM, Horst Gutmann wrote:
 > Every conference I've attended so far had at least on or two time
 > slots each day where none of the talks appealed to me and so I went
 > to explore the city or just got some sleep at the hotel. This way the
 > event stayed fresh and exciting to me and I didn't feel bad for
 > skipping some talks if I simply didn't feel like it. That naturally
 > only works to a certain extend and eventually I just want to get out
 > of the conference again.

I guess that's one way to deal with it (especially in Florence!). But I 
wonder whether that's a way to cope with a problem: should there be time 
slots at a conference with 3 or 4 or more parallel tracks where none of 
the talks appeal to an attendee? Of course you can't please everyone, 
but if it happens to a lot of people you might have a problem.

When I'm at a conference I tend to want to focus on it. At the third day 
of a three day conference I typically notice I am getting tired. I'm 
glad that lightning talks tend to be slotted in then at EuroPython, 
because that's always a nice variety of things.

Then there's the potential issue of people who simply don't have time 
(or resources) to go to a conference of that length. They can of course 
attend it for a couple of days, but people may instead elect to go to a 
shorter conference instead where they can have the full experience. It's 
hard to get a feel for that though; EuroPython certainly has been 
growing in attendance, so that's an argument against that.

[snip]
 > 5 days is a really long
 > time, so perhaps the orgas and the EPS would be willing to experiment
 > here with the format a little bit I the future? :-)

It seems to have been a slow change.

 From the beginning in 2002, it had been a 3 day conference; in 
Charleroi, in Gothenburg, in 2006 at CERN and in 2007 and 2008 in 
Vilnius there was a 3 day conference too.

In 2009 in Birmingham there were 3 main conference days, plus 3 tutorial 
days before it. This might be the introduction of the tutorial days; 
it's possible there were tutorial days at some previous EuroPython, but 
certainly not all the time -- I find it hard to google up the schedules now.

I misremember EuroPython 2010 in Birmingham (the last time I attended); 
I thought it was like 2009, but best I can find now it had 4 days of 
main conference, plus two days of tutorials in the weekend before it. 
But I cannot Google up the time table so I'm not 100% sure.

I can find an announcement from 2010/11/18 for the conference in 2011 
where the tentative schedule was 2 tutorial days with 4 conference days, 
the same as in 2010 in Birmingham. Then the dates were shifted 
(2011/02/17) to have everything from monday to friday (5 days, talk days 
in parallel with tutorial).

Since I last attended in 2010 and actually forgot it was 4 days in 
Birmingham and was used to 3 day conferences before it, the 5 day 
massive schedule looked rather sudden, but it was not.

Each new format was a reasonable small change from the format of the 
year before. Each change had a motivation, but I wonder whether the 
final effect was entirely intentional.

Regards,

Martijn


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