(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 back, the screen is very far away. Mesquite is more rectangular, but only seats 15 fewer people (210 to Preston Trail's 225) in theatre style, not much of a loss in seating.
- 2006's conference had too little open space: available slots were snapped up very quickly. Having 5 smaller rooms that seat about 50-60 people each will make more slots available; I expect the attendees will still manage to fill all the slots.
- Staff won't need to run all the way to Addison to get supplies; instead we'll use the Bent Tree room closest to the registration desk for storage.
- Because of its remote location, Addison should have fewer people talking outside it and be quieter than Mesquite.
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