Re: conference length

For those who prefer a shorter Python conference, may I recommend the
excellent PyConUK in September (and presumably other "national" conferences
- in quotes because there's a good spread of nationalities present in my
experience). See http://2013.pyconuk.org/#Agenda for an idea of the
schedule from last year.

And see http://pyconuk.org/ for this year where you can now book tickets -
some early birding may still be possible!


On 15 April 2014 22:28, Martijn Faassen <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> EuroPython 2014  Berlin, 21th27th July
> EuroPython mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython
>

_______________________________________________
EuroPython 2014 – Berlin, 21th–27th July
EuroPython mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython