The PyCon US Blog

Online registration for PyCon 2007 is now open. Please go to us.pycon.org/TX2007/Registration for instructions and a link to the registration form . Register before January 15th to get the lower early-bird rate. And don't forget to also book your hotel room before February 1st to get the conference rate; see us.pycon.org/Addison/Hotels for details. This year's pricing is: Regular Student Early-bird registration (before Jan. 15 2007) US$195 $125 Online/mail registration (before Feb. 16 2007) US$260 $150 At the conference US$360 $250 Our apologies for the delays in getting registration open.

Now that the schedule has been drafted, here are some more notes on the proposals this year. Thanks to the program committee, who wrote brief reviews of all the proposals: Chair: Nicholas Bastin Aahz David Ascher George Belotsky Michael Bernstein Brett Cannon Kendall Clark Catherine Devlin Mary Gardiner Grig Gheorghiu David Goodger Garry Hodgson Peter Kropf Ivan Krstić Michelle Levesque Duncan McGreggor Anna Martelli Ravenscroft 104 proposals were submitted. The first estimate of the available time added up to about 50 talks, but the posted schedule has space for 69 talks. Despite this increase, a number of good talks still weren't accepted for various reasons; for example the proposal might have overlapped with another accepted talk, or we may have wanted to fit in more talks about a different application domain. If your proposal didn't get accepted, sorry; please consider giving a lightning talk or holding an open-space session. Last year about 80 proposals w

The lightning talk session is invariably one of the more popular blocks at PyCon. Lightning talks have a strict 5-minute time limit, so ten or eleven talks fit into an hour and the audience learns about several projects or ideas very quickly. The short length also forces speakers to dispense with preliminaries and concentrate on two or three major points. Speakers like lightning talks because they're easy to prepare; three or four slides, perhaps a quick demo, and you're done. This is why PyCon 2007 will have four lightning talk sessions. Friday, 12:45 PM (during lunch; sponsors have first priority). Friday, 5:30 PM. Saturday, 5:55 PM. Sunday, 4:25 PM. The lunchtime session on Friday is for PyCon sponsors to give lightning talks about their product, job openings, or whatever they wish. See the LightningTalks wiki page for information on signing up to be a speaker.

After much delay, the slate of talks and tutorials for PyCon 2007 is now public. List of talks List of tutorials An early draft of the conference schedule is also available. This schedule is still subject to change -- speakers may report conflicts that will require some rearrangement, and session times may still shift around a little. Be especially cautious if you're selecting what time to leave on Sunday; if the Sunday afternoon talks are shuffled, you might have to miss an interesting session. This draft of the schedule is published using Google™ Spreadsheets as a temporary measure; soon we'll switch to using our own conference application for the schedule.