| zeth | okay my poor attempt at making a new UK Python logo | 00:07 |
|---|---|---|
| zeth | http://files.zeth.net/flag.png | 00:07 |
| zeth | not very good of course | 00:07 |
| zeth | but I have no graphics skills at all | 00:07 |
| zeth | Oeuf de serpent trying to be a flag | 00:08 |
| pboddie | zeth: Nice idea, though. Perhaps you could adapt a Union Jack to be more serpent-like. | 00:13 |
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| zeth | well I think something that is similar proportions to the proprietary Python logo | 00:21 |
| zeth | but one is facing left and one is right | 00:22 |
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| zeth | another cool idea would be a snake whose tail opens like a saxophone | 00:25 |
| zeth | joke on the fact that the UK event is held in a music college | 00:26 |
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| lac | pboddie: honesty is best policy. say that we are short about 12 and would like to extend things | 00:41 |
| pboddie | I've made a blog entry, but I can always edit it: http://europython.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/extension-of-the-talk-submissions-period-for-europython-2008/ | 00:42 |
| pboddie | If we're really desperate, I can always give a talk. ;-) | 00:43 |
| lac | we can have a panel discussion on volunteering for ep, AND maybe we should. | 00:43 |
| lac | its a little weaselly for my taste. | 00:44 |
| pboddie | I don't think the Future of EuroPython session went that well ultimately. | 00:44 |
| lac | say we have 50 submissions and we would like to have 65 -90 | 00:44 |
| pboddie | I didn't know there'd be a Jython panel - that went completely under my radar. | 00:45 |
| lac | yes, i don't either, but mayube that was because it was not run well | 00:45 |
| lac | my radar as well | 00:45 |
| lac | I like extensions whihc are fat on details. | 00:45 |
| pboddie | I'd have preferred a smaller session with the people who actually organised the conference so we could at least go through what didn't go well. | 00:45 |
| lac | thaqt let people know the conference is not desparate, just looking to do better. | 00:45 |
| lac | fabio wants one of those for conference organisers. | 00:46 |
| lac | or would be ones. | 00:46 |
| pboddie | That's the hard part of wording these announcements. ;-) | 00:46 |
| lac | that's the problem with asking me for criticism -- I give lots of it, and even suggestions but it may not be any better my way | 00:47 |
| pboddie | The problem with a plenary session is that most people just give the blank stare and/or agree that they could possibly do something. | 00:47 |
| lac | I offten only give a different one for contrast. | 00:47 |
| * lac nods sadly | 00:47 | |
| pboddie | I think people need to "buy in" somehow or be really motivated. It's a bit like people saying that Python wasn't very popular for Web applications compared to PHP and there was much denial and/or calm nodding of heads. It was only when the Rails people lit a fire under them that they pulled together. | 00:48 |
| lac | Some how the pyconuk mailing list seems way more motivated than the ep-improive list. | 00:49 |
| lac | any idea why? | 00:50 |
| pboddie | Well, John would say that it's the locality thing in action, or perhaps ease of collaboration. | 00:50 |
| pboddie | I think that conferences which blur the local and "global" elements tend to have people who are more motivated to show that they can make it a success. | 00:51 |
| pboddie | It's almost an issue of pride. And if things need doing, people can easily be badgered to do them. | 00:51 |
| pboddie | As someone who has hosted EP, I guess you must have some insight into such matters. | 00:52 |
| lac | yes but I have hosted other things which I have done, turnout wise, more successfully. | 00:55 |
| lac | Gothcon is the largest European boardgaming conference. | 00:55 |
| lac | we get many thousands here in Gothenburg each year | 00:55 |
| lac | it has been going on for 31 years now, or 32 maybe. | 00:55 |
| lac | Jacob was one of the first organisers. | 00:56 |
| lac | why does it get more volunteers than we do? | 00:56 |
| lac | I think -- because the bulk of volunteers are local to the event. | 00:56 |
| lac | and Göteborg has many orders of magnitude more gamers than vilnius has python programmers. | 00:57 |
| lac | but I could be wrong about the reasons. | 00:57 |
| pboddie | But a lot of this stuff doesn't really need local organisers. I think the locality thing is the major factor, but it's not really very logical. | 00:57 |
| pboddie | But perhaps people don't realise that much of the stuff can be decoupled. | 00:58 |
| pboddie | It's like the Web stuff, registration, talks management, reviewing, and all that can be managed separately. There are even services for this kind of thing, which is what Indico is about, but there are commercial software-as-a-service offerings as well as free (as in beer) ones. | 00:59 |
| pboddie | For example, GUADEC uses such a service. | 00:59 |
| pboddie | But perhaps such things make people feel distanced from the event if people aren't careful. That it's just another conference alongside hundreds of others. | 01:01 |
| lac | I think that what we have is too big a distance between 'I want to make something happen' | 01:03 |
| lac | and 'poof -- there it is'. | 01:03 |
| lac | If our distance was short we could have right now a 'everybody think about what they want' | 01:03 |
| lac | session for a weekend say, over irc, and get a lot of good stuff to do. | 01:04 |
| lac | instead now, we get a lot of ideas that are hard to implement, | 01:04 |
| lac | and need code and infrastructure, | 01:04 |
| lac | so ... creativity lags. badly lags. | 01:04 |
| jacob22 | I think that our big problem is that we had some organisers who cared too little about building a community of the EuroPython volunteers, and that we lost a number of key people, without having people lined up to take their jobs. This is slowly changing, but it will take about 3 more years before we are in a comfortable situation. And bad things can happen in the meantime, unless we control the situation. | 01:04 |
| lac | I am not sobner now, this may not have made sense, if so I am sorry, | 01:05 |
| lac | it makes sense with beer, | 01:05 |
| pboddie | Things often do make sense with beer, however. ;-) | 01:05 |
| pboddie | Not 5 or more, however, in my experience. But that's just me. ;-) | 01:06 |
| pboddie | I think a certain volume of organisers is a good thing because it's often easier to build a consensus, which seems counterintuitive, but if you consider some kinds of decisions, someone often suggests something and then isn't sure about whether it's the right thing. With few organisational peers, that person is likely to hesitate and wait for more input (that they'll probably not get), whereas with many organisational peers with an opi | 01:08 |
| pboddie | confirmed more rapidly (or blown out of the water). | 01:08 |
| lac | well, we have survived the decline of Zope, the creation of their own conferences by Plone | 01:09 |
| pboddie | It's like a "reverse bikeshed" effect: you need people who are invested in the organisation, and then you potentially get quality decisions. Whereas with lots of opinion-givers (without a stake in the project) you just get a bikeshed effect. | 01:09 |
| lac | and our existence in Lithuania, where there really isn't a cadre if locals -- just aiste and that just some of the time. | 01:10 |
| lac | it has got to be easier to find people in the uk. | 01:10 |
| jacob22 | lac: Yes, 3 local enthusiasts is about what is needed to get the base of the event working really well. | 01:13 |
| pboddie | I think that we've got reasonable infrastructure now. It's not very shiny, but it should be manageable. I think people get distracted by infrastructure and think that it's necessary to build the ultimate talk reviewing system, for example, but it's not really worth it for the volume of material being managed, especially if you have motivated people rather than some kind of Slashdot-like "mod up/down" crowd. | 01:14 |
| * lac nods at pboddie | 01:14 | |
| lac | next year I want to set up a pre-con talk writing workshop so that we can get better talks. | 01:15 |
| lac | this year not sure I CAN | 01:15 |
| lac | and I am drunk and sleepy and should go to bed | 01:15 |
| pboddie | But perhaps the shiny aspects attract the volunteers and then you present them with the real work. However, looking at PyCon's review situation, I think they made it too easy to make things difficult, and the result was arguably lower quality reviews. | 01:15 |
| lac | pboddie their review system did not understand what reviewing is about, and was more a popularity system | 01:16 |
| jacob22 | pboddie: The trick is to keep what is good and not throw it out. Then we can put the efforts into improving the aspects that suck, rather than build fro scratch every year. | 01:16 |
| lac | they suffered from that, but the USA is a bad place to discuss the difference between popular and good | 01:16 |
| pboddie | lac: Exactly. And it's a total distraction. | 01:16 |
| lac | because there are too m,a ny people for whom its the same thing. | 01:17 |
| lac | and the educating of them is very hard, | 01:17 |
| lac | and they fight it. | 01:17 |
| lac | but I must sleep now. to drunk and tired to make much sense. but plenty sober enough to say things that I regret in the morning. | 01:18 |
| lac | bad combination. :-) | 01:18 |
| pboddie | lac: Yes, remember that this channel is logged. ;-) | 01:19 |
| pboddie | Although Marius can probably be paid to remove the logs if necessary. ;-) | 01:19 |
| pboddie | jacob22: What I wanted to do was to push forward something that was more acceptable than what had been used before. I don't see a reason to replace it in the foreseeable future, even though I'm sure people want to geotag themselves all over the conference (which you could probably do with MoinMoin by writing a macro) using a combination of Django, TurboGears and Pylons. | 01:20 |
| pboddie | As far as fancy infrastructure is concerned, I liken the experience to what I have to do with databases at work: people may worry about optimising their CRUD-style Web application and their object-relational mapper for a few tens of records, but if they had to deal with the crunching of millions of records, they'd soon get a new perspective about what is good enough for each scenario. | 01:21 |
| jacob22 | pboddie: Then they can write the software for that themselves. Anyway, I guess I'm still annoyed that the software that I spent a huge effort on developing, and which was very much liked by the users just got tossed away. I'd like that not to happen to what you have built. | 01:23 |
| pboddie | I have the MoinMoin mafia on my side now. ;-) | 01:24 |
| jacob22 | I hope that is a good thing. ;-) | 01:25 |
| ThomasWaldmann | >:P | 01:27 |
| pboddie | Well, I think it mostly settles arguments (with sane people) about the community aspects of the site, which was a big problem with CPS. Plus, all the other conferences have used Wiki solutions to fairly good effect. | 01:27 |
| pboddie | So, it's a solved problem as far as I'm concerned. Certainly, the UK people seem to agree, so I guess the concept will stick for another two years. | 01:27 |
| pboddie | All the energy spent complaining about it can be directed elsewhere. ;-) | 01:28 |
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| pinner | pedronis: are you here? | 17:36 |
| pedronis | pinner: sort of | 17:37 |
| pinner | sorry, we have the time muddled up - UK time vs CET | 17:37 |
| pinner | moreati is here, and we have started the web pages for talks... | 17:37 |
| pinner | see registration.europython.eu/talk_abstracts.html... | 17:38 |
| pinner | and registration.europython.eu/speaker_bios.html | 17:38 |
| pinner | we still have to put the correct logo on the header | 17:38 |
| pedronis | I see | 17:39 |
| pinner | but you get the ideas of what we are doing, the html gets generated off the talks data | 17:39 |
| pinner | and we want to see if you are happy with it... | 17:39 |
| pinner | if you're happy, we get more talks entered over the weekend | 17:40 |
| pedronis | yes, I need to go over the talks and see if there is something that cannot be accepted | 17:40 |
| pinner | ok, we can still enter them all, it's easy to delete any which are not accepted after | 17:40 |
| pedronis | yes, that's fine, as long as the urls are not public | 17:41 |
| pedronis | pinner: I bookmarked the urls | 17:43 |
| pedronis | thanks for the work | 17:45 |
| pinner | This is Alex impersonating John. We're just tweaking the code to place the talks in the accepted categories, there was some hard coding from PyCon UK 2007 to remove. Bare with us a few more minutes. | 17:48 |
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| pinner | pedronis: We've based the talk categories on the call for proposals at http://www.europython.org/community/CallForParticipation | 17:50 |
| pinner | Are you happy with these categories as is? More can be added, or changes made fairly easily. | 17:50 |
| pedronis | people were supposed to give such a category in the submission? | 17:51 |
| pedronis | I suspect we need to get the whole picture to see how well they work for the actual talks | 17:51 |
| pinner | Where people have given no category, we've chosen a category for them. | 17:52 |
| pedronis | that's ok | 17:52 |
| pinner | if it's ok with you , we'll just get them all entered, them we can see what we have... | 17:53 |
| pedronis | indeed | 17:53 |
| pinner | and change categories, reject talks then | 17:53 |
| pinner | ok? | 17:53 |
| pedronis | yes | 17:54 |
| pinner | ok, we'll get on with it over the weekend! | 17:54 |
| * pinner says goodbye, have a good weekend | 17:55 | |
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| pboddie | Hello! I revised the extension announcement for submissions slightly. Any comments? | 21:35 |
| pboddie | http://europython.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/extension-of-the-talk-submissions-period-for-europython-2008/ | 21:35 |
| jacob22 | pboddie: Looks very good. | 21:51 |
| pboddie | Just checking so that I can post messages to the lists saying more or less the same thing. | 21:52 |
| dboddie | jacob22: The sponsorship brochure on the Wiki has been updated. | 22:05 |
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| jacob22 | dboddie: Thanks! | 23:52 |
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