The PyCon US Blog

PyCon 2009's first official press release has been posted on the Press page . Help spread the word about PyCon 2009! For less formal channels (like mailing lists), here's a shorter and simpler announcement. Cut, paste, and share at will. PyCon 2009 Python community conference Chicago, IL March 27-29, 2009 http://us.pycon.org/ PyCon 2009, the seventh annual community conference for the Python programming language, will take place March 27-29 at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare Hotel in Chicago, IL. The pre-conference tutorials have been expanded to two days (March 25-26), and the conference will be followed by four days of development sprints (March 30 - April 2). As Python usage has grown rapidly, PyCon has grown as well. PyCon 2008's attendance topped 1000, up from 410 just two years before. Organizers expect this PyCon to be the biggest and most active ever. All interested community members are invited to help make PyCon great. The Call for Proposals is open to receive s

U. S. citizens are preparing to vote next month. Unfortunately, many of their votes will be collected by software of unverifiable quality and accuracy. Carl Flatow of NPR's Science Friday came to PyCon 2008 during the after-conference sprints. One of the leading lights of the Python community that he met was Ka-Ping Yee , who has done important work on this very problem. With elections looming, Carl has released his video interview with Ka-Ping about open source vs. proprietary voting software in general, and about PVote in particular. View it at the NPR Science Friday website!

Doug Napoleone, who maintains the web application used for tracking talk proposals, has opened up the proposal system's statistics to the world; previously, this page was restricted to members of the program committee. It's still early, so only four proposals have been submitted at the time I'm writing. The graph of activity will get more interesting as the deadline approaches and the program committee begins intensively reviewing and commenting. Remember, the deadline for tutorials is October 31 and the talk proposal deadline is November 3, so start thinking about what you could do!