PyCon gives attendees time to organize their own discussions
PyCon 2017 opens in Portland with a program that combines scheduled instruction, implementation discussions, and attendee-created Open Spaces.
A conference program has to choose its subjects before its participants arrive. That makes scheduled talks useful for prepared explanations, but leaves less room for questions that emerge when developers meet. PyCon 2017 provides a second scheduling mechanism for those questions. Its Open Spaces let attendees reserve discussion rooms on site, alongside the main talk program, without first turning an interest into an accepted conference presentation.
PyCon begins its activities in Portland today, May 17. The Language Summit schedule places that invitation-only meeting at the Oregon Convention Center from 10am to 4pm. The larger conference will bring together people with different relationships to Python, including implementation developers and developers building products with the language. Those groups need different kinds of discussion, and the program does not try to put all of them into one format.
I regard that breadth as one of Python's practical strengths. The ecosystem is a major reason to choose the language, even when the language's tooling is frustrating. A conference that gives library users a place to ask their own questions can connect that ecosystem more directly to the people maintaining it.
Open Spaces distribute control of the program
In her May 15 announcement, Open Spaces chair Anna Ossowski describes five tracks of these sessions running alongside five tracks of talks. Each Open Space is a one-hour meetup during the three main conference days. Attendees create the sessions locally instead of following a program fixed months earlier.
The difference is procedural. A participant with a question about a framework can reserve a space and invite others with the same interest. There is no requirement in the announcement to prepare a lecture or represent a project officially. Ossowski describes any subject or activity that interests at least two attendees as a possible session. The format admits technical discussions and activities whose purpose is simply to bring people together.
This can accommodate questions that do not make good talks. An application developer may need to compare requirements with other users before there is a clear conclusion to present. A maintainer may want to hear which parts of an interface people misunderstand. These are examples of how the format can be used, not reports of meetings that have already happened at this year's event.
The scheduling board is part of the mechanism. Ossowski says it will sit near registration so attendees can discover sessions while moving through the conference. Hosts can add contact information to their cards, and the announcement encourages the #PyConOpenSpace hashtag for promotion. Discoverability matters because an available room has little value if the relevant participants cannot find the discussion.
A day of notice changes participation
The announcement describes two boards each day, one for the current day and one for the next. That gives a host time to advertise a discussion before its hour begins. It also gives attendees a chance to include the session in their plans instead of learning about it after choosing a competing talk.
The first board is scheduled to appear at Thursday evening's opening reception. That allows Friday sessions to be organized before the main conference begins. It is a small administrative decision with a concrete effect on who can participate. An attendee who needs advance notice gets a better opportunity than a schedule created only on the morning of the discussion.
There is still a tradeoff in running sessions alongside talks. Attendees must choose between activities, and an informal discussion does not automatically provide the prepared explanation a speaker has developed. The gain is that participants can define the subject and adjust the discussion to the people in the room. Different questions justify different uses of that hour.
Implementation discussions have another format
The Language Summit has a narrower audience. Its published description identifies developers of Python implementations, including CPython, PyPy, Jython, and IronPython, and says discussion takes priority over presentations. Larry Hastings and Barry Warsaw chair this year's meeting. Invitations and advance signup give that meeting a different participation model from Open Spaces.
The summit's stated subjects include the language and standard library, development processes, documentation, and the package index. These are areas where decisions can affect people beyond a single implementation. Bringing implementation developers together creates an opportunity to compare constraints, although the schedule itself establishes no particular technical decision or agreement.
I am especially interested in discussions that make shared maintenance problems concrete. Python's value to an application depends on work distributed across its interpreter and packages. Giving that work a meeting format is useful even when there is no new syntax or release to announce.
Product developers have a visible role in the program too. The May 1 Startup Row announcement schedules companies in the Expo Hall on May 19 and 20, followed by the jobs fair on May 21. It describes companies using Python for applications including data processing and web development. These are scheduled opportunities to discuss how the language is used, separate from the implementation meeting's purpose. The program's several participation formats let a question about running an application reach a different audience from a question about implementing Python itself.