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Welcoming a new co-chair and the next PyCon host city!

As PyCon 2015 gets underway with a fresh new website and a recently opened Call for Proposals, the conference organizers, led by chair Diana Clarke and co-chair Mathieu Leduc-Hamel, would like to welcome Brandon Rhodes to the team as co-chair.

Brandon has been a prolific speaker in the Python community, covering a wide array of topics in the talks he's given at PyCon US since 2008, each PyOhio since 2011, PyCon Poland, Code Mash, DjangoCon Europe, and both PyCon Canadas, as well as the presentations he's given to user groups. Along with speaking, he's volunteered in several capacities, including assisting with the A/V crew. He's also authored the second edition of Foundations of Python Network Programming, and has written a host of helpful blog posts and some quite complete Stack Overflow answers. Overall, he's a very active and helpful member of the Python community.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Brandon at the PyCon 2011 sprints in Atlanta to walk him through getting started as a CPython contributor. While getting started by running coverage, he noticed something was off in the results, so we dug into the order of imports during interpreter startup in order to fix coverage before going further with the results. Rather, he methodically worked everything out and talked his way through every step, as I mostly watched and got to hear how he worked. It was a really great experience, and myself and the rest of the PyCon organizers look forward to working with him.


PyCon's next home is...


After a thorough evaluation of several potential host cities, the Python Software Foundation has chosen Portland, Oregon as the next location for PyCon. Following PyCon 2015, taking place in Montréal for the second time, Portland will play home to PyCon for 2016 and 2017.

Portland edged out several other cities in the running, and will be a wonderful venue. Several other technology conferences call Portland home, including OSCON, which hosted the last International Python Conference, the precursor to PyCon.

Following PyCon's trip into Canada, the Portland PyCons will represent the seventh location of PyCon, coming after Washington, D.C.; Dallas, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Atlanta, Georgia; Santa Clara, California; and Montréal, Quebec, Canada.

As dates for the Portland events become available, we'll be sure to announce them here.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Why not something more CENTRAL?
Brian Curtin said…
There are a lot of factors to take into account as we prefer to have the conference in different locations every two years. We've been East, South, Central, Southeast, West, into Canada, and now Northwest. Perhaps the next time around ends up somewhere more central, but it's based on cost, availability, and many other things.
Anonymous said…
Is their a way of volunteering for the setup? Who is going to organize the event in Portland?
I love Portland! This is great news.

Just don't let anyone stay at the Portland Convention Hotel, formerly known as the Red Lion, across from the convention center. I stayed there for OSCON last month and the place is a dump.
Anonymous said…
CENTRAL? How about somewhere people actually want to visit (like Portland or Montreal)
wescpy said…
The other thing is that Python organizers from CENTRAL need to submit proposals. The team can only work with and make decisions for cities/communities that have offered/applied to host the conference. It's not like they pick city names out of a hat.