While the program committee toils away over the record number of talk and tutorial submissions, we are pleased to announce that registration is now open for PyCon 2011. Get your tickets early, because for the first time, we will have to cap this year's registration at just 1500 spots.
Something most people don't know about me is that I am a data geek. So, being who I am, I have gone back through the statistics for the past four years of PyCon to see if I could find any way of gauging the health of the conference from early in the cycle. I found that there was an almost perfect correlation between the number and timing of the talk submissions for PyCon and the final attendance.
This year, we got more talk and tutorial submissions than ever before in the history of PyCon. We broke the previous records by double-digit percentages in every category.
I shouldn't have been too surprised. We started hearing people get excited about this upcoming PyCon eight months ago. To keep from overwhelming our venue, we have decided that we need to cap attendance at 1500 people. We also promised that those who submitted a talk or tutorial proposal would be guaranteed a slot, meaning that of those 1500 tickets, approximately 250 are already spoken for.
Early bird registration rates are effective until January 17. Regular registration rates will run from January 18th until March 1 - if there are any spots left. More information is available on the registration page as well as a direct link to our registration site.
