[Zope-dev] A note on the PyCon Program committee.

[Lennart Regebro]

I was on the PyCon-PC this and last year. Unfortunately, I had less
time this year, and the workload was higher, and the time shorter, so
they were forced to have many meetings in the middle of the night, my
time. So I spend way too little time on it. That pretty much meant
that the only other guy doing Zope on the program PC is Brandon, and
he is a busy guy too.

The result of this was that yesterday it looked like almost no Zope
talks would be accepted, because during the last weeding out of talks
(there was WAY too many really good talks this year) they all ended up
in different groups, and got voted out. This is mainly because those
who did the grouping didn't understand that talks about to various
Zope-related technologies like Repoze, BFG and the component
architecture are at least somewhat related, so they ended up in
different groups, and then they don't understand why things like
component architectures are important, so the talks get voted out.

I was unfortunately on a Plane during the last meeting yesterday, back
home from the PloneConf, so I wasn't on that meeting, but what I
gather from todays emails and the stats on the talks site, the
situation has been ameliorated, so there will be at least some Zope
talks, I think. But it was a close call.

What to do? Easy: We need more people from the Zope community on the
PyCon program committee. Next year, when the talks for 2011 gets
decided, there seriously have to be more Zope people in the PC,
especially people in US timezone and involved with or closely
following all the new things that's happening. The Zope community is
pushing a lot of the development in the Python world and is continuing
to be the source of much innovation, we shouldn't let that run out in
the sand just because the rest of the Python community lags behind us
a year. ;-)

Obviously, if you join next year, you should still keep a cool head
and look at it objectively, we do not want the PC being swamped by
people who only will vote for Zope talks. We just need a couple of
more people who know what the Zope/BFG/ZTK talks are about and have
time to sit through the meetings (who are on IRC).

Besides, even though the PC was much bigger this year, the number of
submissions was much greater too, so the workload was still too high,
so the PC will most likely still need more people in general.

----------

I will also say, that if your Zope-related talk isn't accepted (I
think the notifications of who are accepted and who aren't are going
to go out soon) do not feel disheartened. There was way more
submissions this year. Last year, we only needed to cut a few high
quality talks (I seem to remember that it was three). This year, loads
of them has been cut. I think there was almost the same amount of
talks deemed worthy of PyCon this year as it was submissions in total
last year. Last year, about two thirds was accepted, this time less
than half, despite what I feel is a generally higher quality of
submissions.

Getting a talk accepted to PyCon 2010 was doubtlessly hard, and many
good talks has been rejected. And I'm not saying that to make people
feel good, but because it is true.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
+33 661 58 14 64