The Welcome Uncomittee will be holding welcome sessions on Thursday and Friday evenings to help orientate people to PyCon. We'll present an overview of the conference and give helpful suggestions on how to get the most from the conference. Ask at the registration desk for more information.
PyCon is the premier conference to learn about Python. There are tutorials, conference sessions, lightning talks, hallway sessions, poster session, startup row, open spaces and sprints.
Quick, fun, five-minute talks on almost any topic. Want to give a lightning talk at PyCon? Just sign up at the conference.
Hallway sessions are where many discussions take place outside of conference sessions. They're typically continuations of a session that just took place.
A poster session is like the science fair from school. Poster sessions are a dedicated expo of PyCon community members sharing their work in the format of a large graphic poster presentation. Presenters are on hand to describe and discuss their discoveries, creations, and projects with the PyCon attendees.
Open spaces are a way to let people come together to talk about topics, ideas or whatever they want. Outside the open space rooms, there's a board where open spaces can be scheduled. Have a topic you're interested in? Find it on the board and join the conversation. If it's not listed yet, find an open timeslot and add it!
Open spaces live by the "law of two feet". Basically this means, if you aren't contributing, learning, or having fun in an open space you should vote with your feet and find another open space to join. Open spaces are for the benefit of everyone in the room, so if you aren't getting anything out of it, it isn't rude to leave, it's encouraged!
Sprints are four days of intensive learning and development on an open source project of your choice, in a team environment. It's a time to come together with colleagues, old and new, to share what you've learned and apply it to an open source project. It's a great way to join an open source project and help make it better. Everyone is welcome, newbies to aging gray haired developers.
Anyone who is wearing a pink "Ask Me About PyCon" tag can help.
Enjoy the conference!
Steve Holden, Steve Piercy, Rami Chowdhury,
Minesh B. Amin, Yarko Tymciurak and Peter Kropf