Vancouver Python Workshop Organizing Committee

Dates

The conference will be from Saturday, July 31 to Monday, August 2nd (which is a holiday in Canada). This means that the Vancouver Python Workshop starts the day after O'Reilly's Open Source Conference in Portland. The two conferences are not formally connected but we hope that some people will be able to attend both.

Organizing Committee

Venue

Most of the conference will likely be ActiveState. We will ask them for the Mezzanine, Blue-room and Gold-room. It is possible that we might negotiate a more ambitious (i.e. larger, fancier) venue with a university. But ActiveState is simple to negotiate and won't give us headaches about union workers, Wi-fi access, outside food etc. One idea that is floating around is to have a keynote

Related Events

Saturday night we will probably have an unofficial get-together (rent a bar?).

Transportation

If there are several people coming from OSCON to VPW, we may want to rent a bus to transport them. Otherwise we'll use carpools.

Profit

If the conference generates profit, it will either go the Python Software Foundation or perhaps to some kind of grant to a Python programmer within Canada. Committee members are of course excluded from any grant.

We will work to keep our expenses low so that the risk of money loss is minimal.

Featured Speakers

Guido Van Rossum and Paul Everitt will speak at and attend the conference.

Price

The base price for people representing organizations is $150.00. There are discounts for people in these categories:
Standard corporate/organizational/academic $150.00
Small business or unemployed $60.00
Willing to sign paper to the effect that they were turned down for corporate/organizational/academic funding to come to the conference. (corporation name cannot be on badge) $60.00
Speakers $45.00
University student (max 20) $30.00
High school student (max 20) $20.00

Attendance

Due to space limitations, we should cap attendance at 125 people.

Our worst-case estimate should be 50 paying attendees at an average price of $50.00 each. That will raise $2500.00 which will either go to speaker expenses or to the PSF.

Open session

We intend to ask SFU to allow us to have an open lecture at the SFU Harbour center.

(Very!) Rough Schedule

Day 0: Introduction to Python/sprints

Day 1 Morning Common Plenary:
    Guido: "State of the Python Union"
    Andy McKay and Paul E.: "Zope and Plone: Python's killer apps"

Day 1 Morning Talks:
    Mezz: General Python
        Talk 1
        Talk 2
    Blue: Plone
        Talk 1
        Talk 2

Day 1 Aft 1:
    Mezz: General Python
        Talk 1
        Talk 2
    Blue: Plone
        Talk 1
        Talk 2

Day 2  Aft 2:
    Mezz: General Python
        Talk 1
        Talk 2
    Blue: Zope
        Talk 1
        Talk 2

Day 2 Morn1, Morn2, Aft1 (3*2*2=12 talks):

    Mezz: General Python
    Blue: Overflow Plone or Zope or General Python

Day 2 Afternoon Common Plenary:
    Guido: "Python Question and Answer"
    David: "Charting Python's Growth" or some such