PyCon 2010 Open Spaces

PyCon 2010 continued the practice of Open Spaces (if you don’t know what those are, click here). I really enjoyed the Open Space track last year and greatly looked forward to it this year. Unfortunately, I only managed to get to one and that was the wxPython BoF that I had posted on the board. The major flaw that I saw this year was that there were two contradictory Open Space boards. There was one outside the doors into the Open Space corridor that had blocks given using the 24-hour time format (i.e. 1300 hours) and then was another board just inside the doorway with the same room letters and most of the same times, but in normal U.S. format (i.e. 1 p.m., 2 p.m., etc). Thus, it was very hard to know which board to follow.

For example, I wanted to go to the Python Authors BoF (BoF = Birds of a Feather). When I went down there, the outside board said it was in so-and-so and the inside board was blank. I went looking for this room, but found other people instead (I think they were the django folk). I don’t know where the authors thing was or if it even happened.

My wxPython BoF fared no better. I had put down my time slot on both boards in hopes of mitigating the confusion, but there was some huge group in the room I had reserved anyway. They left about 5-10 minutes after my BoF was supposed to start, which I think caused us to lose participants. We only had 6 people show up whereas last year it was closer to triple that amount.

All in all though, I think the wxPython BoF was alright because I got to meet the two major developers behind Dabo, Ed Leafe and Paul McNett. And Stani showed up too, so I was able to rub shoulders with a few of the cool people of the wxPython niche. We discussed various projects we were working on and helped a wxPython newbie.

Another annoyance was that there never seemed to be any cards handy to fill out to post on the board(s)!. If I’m able to attend PyCon next year, I hope that this area of the conference is shown more love.