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

[Chris McDonough]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> 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.

It would be unfortunate if talks about the framework that seems to generate the 
majority of traffic on the various RSS planets, and has arguably the largest 
*committer* community was omitted due to reviewer fiat.

> 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.

Excellent, thank you, thank you, Lennart.

> 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).

Another way to avoid this in the future besides joining the committee would be 
for notable members of the Zope community to reach out on a regular (daily) 
basis to other Python-using communities.  Offer them well-documented software, 
visit their sprints and conferences, try their alphas, join their IRC channels, 
participate in their maillists and so on.  It's harder to do intercommunity 
politics daily in this way as opposed to "facing off" yearly, but it will have 
a higher, more lasting payoff.

It's "who you know", not "what you know" unfortunately, even in open source, as 
much as we like to believe in meritocracy.

- C