PSSI announced the first ever annual Kenneth Gonsalves Award recipient yesterday, the opening day of PyCon India 2013.

Baiju Muthukadan, popularly known in FOSS circles as "Baiju" was chosen for the award after a selection process where nominations where invited from the community.

Baiju has been a long time Free Software advocate and leader in the Indian FOSS community. He was one of the founders of the Swathanthra Malayalam Comptuting collective, a project which was founded in 2002 to standardize, localize and promote various FOSS applications in the Malayalam language.

He is also a core contributor to Zope and has written books on Zope3 and the Zope Component Architecture (ZCA). Baiju has also contributed to the Koha  project, a popular open source Integrated Library Management framework.

Baiju was one of the earliest members of BangPypers and has been one of the most active and helpful members of the Python community in India.

Baiju works for ZeOmega as Architect, R&D.

He blogs at http://baijum.blogspot.in/ .

All the best to Baiju for his current and future endeavours !

While many of us in the IT industry are intimately familiar with the advances Python is making on the tech. and business frontiers, we often don't see the work happening in other domains. Python has a reputation for being an excellent first language and very easy to study. The Kerala state governments IT@school program teaches Python to high school kids. The CBSE also has introduced Python as an option to C++ for high school students. The FOSSEE.in project introduces free and open source Python based tools to engineers and other people working in scientific domains. 

This year, for the first time at PyCon India, we're putting together a panel of people who have been working in this area and giving them a forum to discuss the topic. The panel will consist of 3 experts on the stage who will have a discussion about the role of Python in the education domain on stage. Questions will be selected in advance to guide the discussion and there will be an open Q/A session at the end. 

The participants for the panel will be. 

1. Dr. Prabhu Ramachandran - Dr. Prabhu is a member of the faculty at the department of aerospace engineering at IITB and has been active in the open source community since 1998.  He is the creator of Mayavi , an active member of the SciPy community and a nominated member of the Python Software Foundation. He was involved in the setting up of FOSSEE.in. He setup the Indian operations of Enthought Inc. in 2011 and is currently a director of Enthought India. 
2. Dr. Ajith Kumar - Dr. Ajith's main area of work is development of instrumentation for particle accelerators and associated experiments, including radio-frequency accelerating structures, control and data acquisition systems, digital and radio frequency electronics modules. He is involved in developing laboratory equipment for teaching physics and engineering following the philosophy of Free Software. Has been a user and propagator of Free Software in the field of education for several years.
3. Dr. Nagarjuna G. - Dr. Nagarjuna holds a faculty position at Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR in Mumbai. He is an author and maintainer of the GNU project GNOWSYS, and leads the gnowledge.org lab in Mumbai. He investigates as part of his research profession at TIFR, the structure and dynamics of knowledge networks and designing distributed computing platforms for education and social change. The gnowledge.org conducts workshops for teachers in the use of ICT for science and mathematics education starting from primary schools to undergraduate education. He is an advocate of free software and open standards for education, eGovernance and conducts workshops for academia and industry, and the chairperson of Free Software Foundation of India.

The panel will be moderated by Noufal Ibrahim. Questions for the panel are welcome. Please send them to noufal at nibrahim.net.in or to the PyCon India mailing list. I can't guarantee that we'll ask all of them but more questions make for a more interesting and fruitful discussion. 

The panel is scheduled to take place in the main auditorium on 31^st August from 2:45 to 3:30 right before the tea break. It's a plenary session so you won't miss any of the talks while this goes on. Everyone is welcome to attend. We'll have a brief Q/A session at the end of the panel.

I hope to see you all there!

GoIbibo is sponsoring the conference at Gold level.

Goibibo.com is a leading online travel site in India that enables travelers to buy air and bus tickets, hotels and holidays. Goibibo has a very strong technology base, enabling it to serve its customers fastest in the market.

Apart for sponsoring the conference, GoIbibo is offering the following discounts  for people attending PyCon India.

• Rs.500/- off on domestic flights using promo code FLYPYCON
• Rs 1000/- off on return International Flights using promo code INTPYCON
• Rs 1000/- off on Hotels Bookings using promo code HOTPYCON (applicable on purchase of Rs 5000/- and above)
• Rs 100/- off on Bus Bookings using promo code BUSPYCON (applicable on purchase of Rs 1000/- and above)

To claim these discounts, book your tickers on http://www.goibibo.com/. Offer valid till 5th Sept 2013.

PyCon India thanks GoIbibo for their support.

We are extending regular registration ticket till August 10. 

We have left with limited seat so book your ticket before it get sold out. http://pyconindia2013.doattend.com/

Regular registrations for PyCon India 2013 will close in 7 days. After this, the ticket cost increases to Rs 1500 and your chances of getting a ticket reduces. 

Why go through all of the trouble ? Book your tickets now !

This year, PyCon India is celebrating the month of August as Python Month, with aim of increasing the awareness and awesomeness of Python Programming Language within the student community in India.

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Python month will be organized and completely run by volunteers, anyone who wants to participate is welcome and all help is appreciated.

This is a big task to handle and therefore requires lot of volunteer support. Here is how you can help.

1. If you are a Python programmer and please give a talk / workshop at a college in your city.
2. If you are a professor or student, please facilitate the a workshop in your college.
3. Help us in coordinating Python Month by talking to colleges to arrange workshops.

Interested? Please sign up here - http://bit.ly/pythonmonth

Have any questions or suggestions? Please contact us at pythonmonth@in.pycon.org

Website: /2013/python-month

We have been getting requests from the community as well as some potential speakers about extending the CFP a bit long, so that those who missed the deadline, can still submit their proposals.

We've listened to them and decided on reopening the CFP for 3 days upto the midnight of  Monday(22 July). Hurry up and submit your proposal while you still can !

Call for proposals has ended today. A total of 98 proposals have been submitted with 75 talks and 23 Workshops.

Proposals now go to evaluation and selection stage which would be complete by July 31st. You will be getting an email from us if your proposal is selected.

Thanks for everyone who took part in the CFP!

PyCon India call for proposals is coming to an end tomorrow. You got one more day to submit your proposals to us and get your name mentioned in the talk roster of PyCon India.

Try to avoid the rush hour and submit early.  Take a trip down the proposal funnel down into the proposal bucket today!

Every year at PyCon India, we love to see more quality, knowledge-filled and enlightening talks. It is only right that we take all efforts from our side to accept such talks. To make it easy for you and for us, we're putting out our expectations from you in this post.

Proposal Submission

While submitting your proposals, make sure to follow the guidelines below:

• Give a brief objective of your talk. This gives the audience a better idea of what they can take away from your presentation
• Add link to your personal website, blog and twitter
• Add link to your GitHub profile
• Add links(videos/slides) to your previous talks, if any
• Write a small paragraph about your experience with Python
• Tell us about your work experience or else mention if you're a student
•  Clearly mention the technical requirements (ex: packages to install) for the audience whether it's a workshop or a single presentation
•  If you are talking about a software library/tool, please mention why you arethe best personto talk about it.
•  Tell us why we should accept your talk in as few lines as possible.

If you have already submitted a proposal, please make sure it meets the above guidelines.

Note to all attendees

We are excited that you're coming along ! To make your experience better and to see more of your favorite talks, make sure to vote on the ones that you'd love to attend.

Number of votes is one of the things that we consider when selecting talks. To deal with fake up votes, we only count the votes by people who have already bought a ticket for the event.

Please up-vote/down-vote the talks in the funnel and help us in selecting talks that you would like to see at conference.

We have received a lot of requests from people across the country, expressing their will to help Pycon India as a volunteer.  We request each candidate to register using the below link  and we'll get in touch with you depending on your area of interest.

Registration Link: http://bit.ly/PyCon2013Volunteer

Looking forward to meeting you all at conference !

Important Dates

Here is a reminder of the dates to keep track of.

1. Conference - August 30  2013- Sept 1 2013
2. Proposal submission deadline: July 15, 2013
3. Proposal acceptance: July 31, 2013
4. Regular Registration - August  01 , 2013

Armin Ronacher

 Armin Ronacher is a prolific speaker and, a very influential voice within the Python community. Armin is well know for his work on Flask, Werkzeug, Jinja2 and a number of other web related projects. He's  a prolific speaker and a very vocal and influential voice in the global Python community. He  currently works at Fireteam Ltd.

Kiran Jonnalagadda

Kiran Jonnalagadda is one of the earliest Python adopters and evangelists in India. He has been active in technology and Open source since the late 90s and has been involved with the Python community and with PyCon India since it's earliest days. Kiran is the founder of HasGeek - a company that creates discussion spaces for geeks.

We have published the PyCon India Code of Conduct for all attendees, sponsors and speakers of PyCon India. Please get yourself familiarized with the code-of-conduct if you are engaging with PyCon India 2013 in any of these roles.

Early bird registration for PyCon India 2013 is open from today onwards.  Hurry up! Book your tickets today.

http://pyconindia2013.doattend.com/

The talk schedules for the conference on Sep 29 and 30 have been published. All special scheduling requests have been taken into consideration while publishing the schedule.

If you are a speaker,  we request you to look at the schedule and learn about the time slot and location of your talk(s), so that you can be prepared ahead. If there are any questions about scheduling please email them to contact@in.pycon.org .

Tutorials schedule has been published on the website. 

Tutorials are scheduled on Friday, September 28. There are 5 parallel tracks and 2 sessions per track. One person can attend a maximum of 2 sessions.

You need to register for the tutorials to be able to attend them. If you have registered only for the conference, but not for the tutorials, you can buy the tutorial addon from PyCon India doattend site.

 See you at the conference!

We would be publishing the schedule for selected talks/tutorials on the site on Sep 16th.

We have already received requests from some speakers on specific time requirements for their talks/tutorials. If you are a speaker for PyCon India 2012, and want specific scheduling for your talk/tutorial, please send in your requests by 14th Sep.   It may not be possible to accommodate everyone, but if you send in your request early enough, we will do our best to do so. Also, for some unfornate reason, you need to cancel your talk/tutorial, please let us know before the schedule gets published.

Kindly note that once the schedule is published, no changes would be entertained.

We have informed everyone who submitted a proposal regarding the status, yesterday through direct emails.

If you submitted a proposal and haven't heard back from us yet, please email us at contact@in.pycon.org .

Thanks to everyone who participated in the CFP!

There is a small technical glitch that is delaying the sending of emails to those speakers whose talk or tutorial proposals have been accepted.

This should be fixed by today evening and accepted speakers informed by EOD Sep 2nd.

Evaluation of talk/tutorial proposals is completed. Announcement of accepted proposals would be done tomorrow (Sep 1 2012)  and the authors informed by email.

Call for proposals has ended today. A total of 80 proposals have been submitted with 64 talks and 16 tutorials.

Proposals now go to evaluation and selection stage which would be complete by August 31st. You will be getting an email from us if your proposal is selected.

Thanks for everyone who took part in the CFP!

PyCon India call for proposals is coming to an end tomorrow. You got one more day to submit your proposals to us and get your name mentioned in the talk roster of PyCon India.

Last year we received nearly 30 submissions just in the last 3 hours. Try to avoid the rush hour and submit early.  Take a trip down the proposal funnel down into the proposal bucket today!

The Call for Proposals (CFP) for talks and tutorials for PyCon India 2012 is ending on August 25. We have received 53 submissions so far. This year we plan to have more talks and tutorials than last year, so there is space for more submissions.

Submit your talk today at PyCon India 2012 funnel. Get up on the stage, get noticed!

We will be conducting the 3rd Annual General Meeting (AGM) of IPSS on the last day of PyCon India 2012. The event will be conducted as the last item of the day after the conclusion of the talks, at 5.30 pm.

This annoncement should be considered as a notice for the AGM. The current office-bearers of IPSS and the members are invited. Anyone else who is interested can also attend.

The event has been posted on the IPSS website as well.

The last date for Regular Registration has been extended to August 31.

There has been very good response so for with more than 400 registrations. I'm sure more people are getting to know about the conference now as our publicity efforts have begin very recently. We've decided to extend the last date considering these factors.

After regular registration closes, we'll open late registrations with a higher registration fee. The number of available seats will be limited by the venue capacity. We may not be able to guarantee t-shirts and other goodies for people who register late. So, register early!

You can register at the DoAttend page for PyCon India.

In the last meeting of PyCon India organizing team, it was decided to support tutorials at PyCon India from this year onwards by providing the speakers with an amount as an honorarium for their efforts.

Every tutorial speaker this year would be receiving an honorararium cheque from IPSS after they have successfully delivered their tutorials. This year it would be a fixed amount, the details of which would be communicated to each accepted speaker directly.  The amount is meant as a support and encouragement for tutorial speakers from PyCon India organizing committee.

The details of the honorarium would be sent as part of the email confirming your submission acceptance. If you have submitted a tutorial proposal, watch out for the details in your mailbox.

If you are planning to submit a talk/tutorial to PyCon India,  this post is meant for you. It is also useful to those who have made submissions already. Read On.

You have a subject matter  that you would like to speak at PyCon India. How to decide whether to submit it as a talk or tutorial ? Here are some guidelines that might help you.

1. How you want to present the topic - Do you want to take a topic, give an overview and some details, perhaps discuss some practical aspects and show at most 1-2 demos ? If so a talk would be suitable, since this style of delivery fits the shorter time span of a talk.  However if you want to explore your topic in a lot of practical detail, show more than 3 demos and actually want to educate your audience on the intricacies of the topic in a hands-on manner, a tutorial would be a better fit, since you need more than an hour for this style of presentation.
2. Breadth of the topic - If you want to take a slightly broader area and educate your audience about it, a tutorial is always a better choice. A talk would be too small for such topics and could bore the audience because you would be forced to be generic about it. For example, "Building apps on Ubuntu" is a topic broad enough that an hour of discussion won't get you anywhere - it is a better fit as a tutorial.  Another example could be "Developing mobile apps using Python for Android" or "Solving puzzles using Python". Examples of such talks from past PyCons are Functional programming with Python and Web Scraping with Python .
3. Do you expect a lot of audience interaction and feedback  for your presentation to be successful ? - If answer to this question is yes, you should submit the topic as a tutorial. Anything which involves detailed audience interaction and feedback would not work as a talk because there will be too much back and forth which would eat up your presentation time.  Examples of these kind of talks are those that teach the audience a skill or details of a library, an application etc. A specific example from past PyCons is Web API programming using Python .
4.  Presentation involving a demo where audience are mostly passive - As in contrast to above, if your presentation is going to be a mostly one-way demo where the audience can learn a lot by simply watching and popping an occasional question, it is best submitted a talk.  Good examples of these in the past PyCons have been Device interfacing with Python and ZIO and Python and WII - Intuitive Control.
5. Topics - Some topics seem to fit a tutorial mould than a talk. Our experience shows us that talks on GUI libraries for example are best delivered as tutorials since audience tends to get bored with textual presentation of something which is best delivered as a visual experience and with lots of hands-on examples. Other examples could be talks on Mobile frameworks, Web frameworks (Django etc) and talks on Big Data frameworks (Hadoop etc). However if you have a specific and concise aspect of any of these topics that you want to present without too many demos, it could fit a talk as well.
6. Introductory Talks - This might sound counter-intuitive, but introductory talks on anything are best delivered as tutorials. This is because the average skill and experience level of any audience is always above beginner level and there might be at least a few people in the audience who would be bored by what they feel as basics. If you define your talks as a tutorial, then the audience for it would be tailored to the level for the talk (in this case beginner) and you would find a more receptive audience and a more successful presentation.
7. Dates - Last but not the least, if for some reason, you can attend only the first day of PyCon India, but still want to talk, you can submit it as a tutorial. This is because, the first day is reserved for tutorials only :-)

These are general guidelines. Please go through past PyCon talks including the links given here, if you are in doubt of whether your topic is fit for a "talk" or a "tutorial". 

People who have already submitted their proposals might also benefit from this. For example, if you feel that you could have submitted something as a tutorial or a talk after reading this, you are welcome to resubmit or edit the submission.

For any further help or clarifications, email me at abpillai@gmail.com .

Where would you go  if you wanted to see, talk and share the experiences of the founder and co-creator of none other than Django, the well-known Python web framework ? 

While doing that, how about meeting, listening to and talking with a well-known Python writer, author, developer and popular columnist who also happens to be part of the PSF board of directors ?

No need to look elsewhere, you can meet the two of them right here at PyCon India this year!

Just make sure you keep your date with the conference during Sep 28-30, 2012.

We have got two esteemed keynote speakers for this edition of PyCon India .

Introducing Jacob Kaplan Moss, the co-creator of Django and Dr. David Mertz, author, columnist, developer and PSF director.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the lead developers and co-creator of Django. In 2005 Jacob joined the Lawrence Journal-World, a locally-owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, and helped develop and eventually open source Django.  He is a consultant with Revolution Systems, where he helps companies deploy and scale websites using Python and Django.

Apart from these, Jacob is,

• Co-author of The Definitive Guide to Django (Apress, 2007).
• Founder and current President of the Django Software Foundation.
• Frequent speaker at Open Source events and conferences including OSCON (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), PyCon (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), Linux.conf.au (2009), and quite a few others.

You can get to know more about Jacob at his Personal Blog .

David Mertz

David Mertz Ph.D, is a well known author, Python programmer and columnist and currently serves on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation.  Over the last several years, he has worked in scientific HPC with D.E.Shaw Research, a company that has built the world's fastest specialized supercomputer for molecular dynamics.

David has written two widely popular columns for IBM's developerWorks, titled "Charming Python" and "XML Matters" since 2000.  He has also written for  Intel Developer Services, O'Reilly's ONLamp, and other online publications. Overall he has written around 200 articles about computer programming, computer science, algorithms and related technical topics during 2000-09. He is the author of the Addison-Wesley book Text Processing In Python .

David is also an expert in open-voting and security related issues of voting and has served as the vice-president and chief technology officer of the Open Voting Consortium and on the IEEE Voting Systems Electronic Data Interchange project. 

You can learn everything about David and his publications and read most of them at his Personal Web Site. You can also find more about David from his Fullwiki Entry and also at C2.

We look forward to welcoming both Jacob and David at PyCon India this year.

Kenneth Gonsalves, one of the very active members of Indian Python community, passed away on August 03, 2012.

Kenneth was instrumental in forming the Indian Python Software Society and served as director of the society for the first year.  His work and efforts have considerably shaped our community and his absence will be felt by all of us.

May his soul rest in peace!

Kindly note that regular registration for the conference will close in 17 days. The last day to register is Aug 15 2012. Register at http://pyconindia2012.doattend.com/

Here is a reminder of the dates to keep track of.

1. Conference - Sep 28-30
2. CFP Deadline - Aug 25
3. Proposal Acceptance - Aug 31
4. Regular Registration - Aug 15

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is sponsoring PyCon India this year by funding the travel of a keynote speaker from the U.S completely. 

PSF has always been a benefactor of PyCon India right from our inception, sponsoring us in 2010 as well. The organizers thanks PSF for their continued support for PyCon India this year as well.

PSF is the non-profit organisation that holds the intellectual property rights of the Python programming language and heads its development and goals.

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Welcome to PyCon India blog.