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Extracurricular Activities at PyCon 2007

At PyCon this year we are having a significant number of activities besides the keynotes and talks. One group of those are the birds-of-a-feather gatherings being held in the evenings.

The Python community consists of a number of smaller communities and we're encouraging them to hold meetings, dinners and other activities at PyCon this year. The organizers have tried to leave room in the busy schedule for these to happen and of course for some non-Python social BoFs as well.

Here are the BoFs with which you have the opportunity to get involved:
  • Python in Education
  • Python in Science
  • Healthcare and Python
  • A Content Repository Standard for Python
  • Jython Development
  • Django
  • Pylons Web Framework
  • Trac Users and Developers
  • Keysigning Party
  • Tech that Runs the Python Conference
  • Users of Bazaar Version Control/Launchpad
  • Buildbot Users and Developers
  • Python Advocacy Community Forum
  • Texas Regional Unconference Dinner Meet
  • PyGame Programming/Playing Clinic
  • Board Game Socials
  • Bowling
  • Climbers
You can check them out at:

http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/BoF

The room/offsite schedule is listed at the bottom of that page but many of the groups have not yet declared when and where they are meeting. Nudges are welcome.

The other set of activities at PyCon are the 4-days of code sprints held at the end of the conference. A sprint is a focused development session, in which developers gather in a room and focus on building a particular subsystem. A sprint is organized with a coach leading the session. The coach sets the agenda, tracks activities, and keeps the development moving. The developers will sometimes work in pairs using the Extreme Programming (XP) pair programming approach.

The sprints that have announced so far are:
  • Work towards Zope 3.4 release
  • Fun Educational Software for "Playful Learning"
  • PyCon-Tech: Improve the convention software
  • Zope 3 Learner's Circle
  • Python Job Board
  • Django
  • Trac
  • Jython
  • Docutils: squash bugs & add features
  • TurboGears
  • Write a Game
  • Create a Win32 version of MySQLdb under Python 2.5
  • SchoolTool & CanDo
Sprint coaches should plan for an introductory session on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning, to help attendees get started. This might involve helping them to get SVN or CVS installed and checking out the development tree, talking about the software's architecture, or planning what the four-day sprint will try to accomplish.

You can read more at:

http://us.pycon.org/TX2007/Sprinting

and even add your name to particular sprint wiki pages, to encourage them to happen.

See you later this week. Get plenty of sleep beforehand, you won't get much at PyCon this year!

Jeff Rush
PyCon Co-Chair

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