The PyCon US Blog

The PyCon organizers have established a short online poll to collect input from the Python community regarding the shirts, tote bag and slogans to be used at PyCon 2007, being held in Addison (Dallas), Texas Feb 23-25 2007. When we put out a prior call for slogan suggestions, we received 104 submissions. We've since reviewed them, narrowed them down to a number reasonable for voting on, and now you can help us decide the winner! Actually, two winners: one slogan for the T-shirt and another for the tote bag. Please take the poll at the following page. We've tried to keep it short, to respect your time. http://us.pycon.org/swagpoll Thanks!

The PyCon organizers would like to announce the slate of keynote speakers who have accepted our invitation to speak at PyCon 2007! For photos, biographies and more, click on the link above. Ivan Krstić (speaking Friday AM) Topic: "The Python machine: Python and One Laptop per Child" Adele Goldberg (speaking Saturday AM) Topic: TBD (probably something related to Zope 3 and Education) Guido van Rossum (speaking Saturday Lunch) Topic: "Python 3000" Robert M. Lefkowitz ("r0ml") (speaking Sunday AM) Topic: "The Importance of Programming Literacy"

Last call if you're thinking about submitting a tutorial proposal: the deadline for submitting PyCon tutorials is Wednesday, November 15th. See the Call for Tutorials for more information.

Last year, there were about 80 people who stayed after PyCon for the sprints that began on Monday. 80 people are a mini-conference in their own right, but on Sunday the scheduled events ran down around 3PM because most attendees are leaving to catch flights out. Co-chair Jeff Rush has suggested that we should have more activities (whether technical or simply fun) on Sunday evening for the sprinters. Do you have any suggestions?

(Reviewing of proposals is still going on; nothing to report at the moment.) PyCon 2007 is in the same hotel as the 2006 conference, and we have the same set of rooms available to us. At a chat session of PyCon organizers on October 30th, we decided to make some radical changes in how we'll be using the rooms. Credit should be given to Doug Napoleone for suggesting this rearrangement. Here's the plan: Ballroom A-E, Ballroom F-J: refereed talks (just like last year). Mesquite (last year's quiet room): 3rd track of refereed talks. Preston Trail and Bent Tree: will both be divided into 3 rooms each = 6 small rooms total. 5 of these rooms will be available for open-space discussions; the 6th will be the conference logistics and storage area. Addison (last year's conference storage room): will be the quiet room. This rearrangement has a bunch of potential advantages: People complained that Preston Trail was too long and skinny for talks; if you were in the ba...

The deadline for submitting talk proposals was yesterday, and the submission application is now no longer accepting new entries. 102 104 proposals were received. (Two proposals arrived a little bit past the deadline.) We expect to accept 50-60 talks for PyCon 2007; the exact number will depend on the final balance of 30- and 45-minute talks. This means we will have to decline roughly half of the talks. We received many more proposals than last year's conference. We received 71 proposals for PyCon 2006, and ended up accepting 56 of them. (The planned lower number of acceptances for PyCon 2007 is because the draft schedule has more lightning talk sessions than 2006's schedule.) Now the hard part for the program committee begins: reviewing all these proposals! The process is described on the ReviewerNotes page .