There was a desire expressed by quite a few folks to have a more structured event, during the conference days, possibly as a part of the hatchery program.
PyCon US 2020’s CFP for the hatchery is now open - do we want to propose an event for the hatchery?
If yes, then I think we should start by exploring:
what do we want to achieve from such an event?
who is willing to take up the task of organizing such a summit?
(PS: Please don’t call this one a mini-summit. :P)
I’ve got finals coming up in college but hey, I wanted to make sure that this discussion is initiated. I’m basically posting this and vanishing for a week. (Sorry!)
Yes, 100%. I was planning to start the proposal this month or in early December. I am happy to share the responsibilities of the proposal with others. I think there are a few different formats we could explore, but assuming the pre-PyCon schedule is the same as it was last year (Language Summit on Wednesday, Education Summit on Thursday), I think we should run it on the Thursday before PyCon alongside the Education summit, since that seems like it will be the minimum of conflicts.
I think this year’s structure of proposed topics ordered by rank in some way and then giving fixed amounts of time for discussion would be best, though we could also do it a bit more formally like this year’s language summit, where people submit proposals for a topic and then have presentations prepared in advance (maybe 5 minute presentation with 25 minutes for discussion).
A pre-conference summit is very dependent on how many relevant folks would be able to attend such a summit before the main conference days.
I don’t think we need the presentations, but someone taking the mantel for each topic and summarizing them would likely be sufficient. Relaxing this would likely make it easier in terms of “overhead” too (no need for a projector/monitors, folks only need to prepare points-to-mention and not presentation files etc).
More broadly, assuming we have folks who’d want to pick up one or more of these tasks, I feel it’d be great if we can have something related to Python Packaging happening throughout the conference:
Pre: Packaging Summit
During: At least 1 packaging-oriented open space + whichever accepted talks are relevant
@pganssle and @pradyunsg: I am unlikely to be able to help co-organize a summit, but I agree that it would be a good idea, and I am in accordance with how both of you are thinking of structuring it. And @pradyunsg I agree about the pre/during/post idea.
Sorry for the super long delay in getting this proposal together. I have created a merge request on gitlab with my proposal for the packaging summit. I would appreciate comments from interested parties.
I put myself as the only member of the “organizing team”, but I’d be very happy to have co-organizers sign on. If you want to join the organizing team, please let me know on the MR and I will push more commits. If you do so, please read through especially the portions about previous organizing experience and give me your own answers to that so I can merge them in.
We’ll know by January 20 whether it was accepted. @bernatgabor@pganssle@Hasnat@tgamblin@pradyunsg if Hatchery doesn’t accept the summit, is there a Plan B for how it can happen without official PyCon support? I’m planning PyCon flights and lodging for various people now and it would be good to know whether I can just go ahead and book things now, or whether I should wait till Jan 20th.
My understanding was, if we don’t have “official” PyCon support, we’d do the summit in the same manner as the last two years: a Mini Summit at on Sprints Day 1.
My plan for if we get a hatchery event going was for the event to be the same day as the Education Summit (since there’s relatively little overlap between attendees of the two), which last year was the Thursday before PyCon, and I’m assuming will be again this year.
I like the idea of that because while we can get good attendance first day of sprints, it pulls a lot of people away from actually getting new contributors up and running at a kind of critical part of sprints. If we don’t get accepted into the Hatchery this year, maybe we can consider doing it that day anyway and just doing it off-site (we can make some inquiries to see if a company with offices in Pittsburgh would be willing to host in that event).
@pganssle I totally understand and get your reasoning for why it would be better to have the event on Thursday, April 16th (the day before full conference talks start), regardless of whether it’s through the Hatchery or through another local venue. A schedule conflict with the first day of sprints (Monday, April 20) is difficult for most of us.
This sounds good to me. If other summit organizers agree, then I would appreciate if you and other organizers could start making preliminary, informal contacts pretty soon. My reasoning: it might take a couple weeks for folks to get approval to host us, and I’d very much like to book my team’s flights by the end of the month (if not sooner).
I’ve requested a space at the Google offices for the summit (as a fallback). I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m confident we can find space here or elsewhere for the summit if the Hatchery falls through.
I may be able to come to PyCon this year, but even if I can, I’d probably not be staying for the sprints. So for me, having the packaging summit during the pre-conference summit period would be better. And in any case, not having to change plans depending on whether we get accepted as a hatchery event or not would be way better.
OK, it seems like we have a solid enough backup plan for the hatchery that we can confidently say that this will happen Thursday, April 16th, 2020 in a location TBD.
Since it seems like people are already making travel arrangements, I’ll prepare a “save the date” of some sort and send it out via the common channels this weekend.
We have officially been accepted into the PyCon US Hatchery Program!
We will have a room at the conference center for the full day on Thursday, April 16th, 2020.
The next steps are:
Create a website for the event on PyCon US’s page
Decide how we want to handle proposals and voting and put out a “call for proposals”.
I will be in touch with those who have volunteered to help organize the event this week. I am hoping we can get the “CfP” as it were up and running by February, with voting maybe running from mid-March up until shortly before the conference (if we decide to do it more like the Language Summit with people preparing slide decks ahead of time, I think we’ll need to give at least a few weeks’ notice to people presenting, so we may need to start and end the voting earlier).
.)