The PyCon 2011 Call for Proposals was sent out September 28th - shortly followed by the call for Tutorials as well. It's my job as the Program Committee chair to help not only manage this process, but also drum up actual proposals. Personally, I do this by heavily relying on you - the Python Community to spread the good word, I also reach out to other groups and communities as much as I can with the help of the entire PyCon organizers, and PyCon program committee teams.
Behind the scenes - it's my job to worry. While each year we see a few proposals trickle in throughout the timeline ending in a tidal wave in the last few days and hours, with this year's abbreviated schedule and timeline, I got really worried really fast. It's important that even though we will only be able to accept a subset of the total number of submitted talks that we get a large number of submissions so we can select from a broad range of speakers, subjects and talk types. We will have the unhappy task, as the review committee, to turn down some number of the submitted talks - this is never fun, and its always painful
So, I worried, and with the enormous help of all of the people out there in the community we've managed, even in a much, much shorter submission timeline, to break all previous talk submission records. As of this writing, we have:
- 210 main conference talk proposals
- 52 Tutorials
This is amazing, and having been reading through the submissions, I can honestly say these are some of the highest quality, most exciting talk proposals I've ever seen - the extreme track alone will blow the doors off! Typically the number of talk submissions is indicative of final attendance - and as the number of submissions grows, so does the attendance. If these numbers are any indicator, when registration opens we will rapidly fill the 1500 reg cap we've had to set.
I wanted to take this moment to thank all of you working on PyCon, and out there in the community helping out - and I especially wanted to thank everyone who has submitted talk proposals. All of you, and all of the attendees will make this a hard PyCon to beat in the future.
On a final note, the PyCon Program Committee is always looking for help reviewing talks and working through the selection process. Please come and help select talks! If you're interested, drop me an email - mailto:jnoller@python.org.
I'm looking forward to seeing you all in Atlanta.
-Jesse
