The PSSI is both happy and proud to announce Vijay Kumar as the winner of this year's Kenneth Gonsalves Award.

Vijay works as an embedded software developer & trainer at Zilogic Systems. Apart from developing Python based embedded systems based on Telit and Embedded Linux there, he also contributes to the development of in-house Python based build and test automation frameworks. To add to that, he trains people in Embedded Linux and device driver development as well.

Vijay's community building activities and involvement goes back more than a decade! He helped create the GNU/Linux User Group of Trichy, back in 2001, when he was an undergrad at NIT Trichy. Since then, he has been promoting Free and Open Source Software, by helping organize meetups, workshops, demo days, and conferences. He got associated with Chennaipy in 2010, and in mid-2011 helped coordinate its activities. For the past 1.5 years, Chennaipy has been put in overdrive mode, rapidly expanding in quality of the meetups, and the diversity of the people attending it.

During his spare time, apart from being a backbone of building the FOSS and Python community in India, he contributes to a myriad of open source projects. To list a few:

• He has contributed to porting U-Boot and the Linux Kernel to the IPQ806x platform, a Qualcomm Snapdragon variant.
• Patch contributions to Qemu, and the Linux Testing Project.
• Also maintains the Free Software tutorials "Embedded Programming with the GNU Toolchain" and "GTK+ Multi-line Text Editing Widget.".

It is a proud moment indeed when you're recognized for all those years of passionate work that you did for the betterment of everyone around you. Our heartfelt congratulations to Vijay Kumar, and we wish him all success and a bright future ahead. We hope the younger generation takes inspiration from his works and contribute more to improve the Free Software and Python programming community.

PyCon India has always been more than just a conference. It has been a place where people who have similar interests find each other and have great conversations.

This time, we want to make room for more such conversations. This time, we are going to make Open Spaces more exciting. Attending PyCon India 2015? Share your experience by giving an Open Space talk.

What is an Open Space?

Open Space (register here) is a way for people to come together to talk about topics, ideas or whatever they want. Any subject that two or more attendees want to talk about is a candidate for an Open Space. Speak about your favorite library, framework, tool, experience, lessons learnt, Discuss code, design, philosophy, editors. Show what projects you are working on. Share what problem you face, what solution looking for, what improvements you would like to see. Smaller group generally leads to a lot more discussions, encourages the audience to ask more questions and keep things lively. Proposals are collected to know how many people are interested to speak which will help us arrange rooms, white boards.

Why we are asking to register upfront?

Proposals are collected to know how many people are interested to speak, which will help us arrange rooms, white boards, projectors and other assets. You can also show up on the day and reserve a time slot if available.

How do I participate in an Open Space?

Its pretty easy: register here with required details. That?s it! No screening process. You can also just show up and register your time slot.

Guidelines

• Allowed time slot for each talk is 15-30 minutes.
• Reach the talk arena, 5 minutes before your talk starts.
• In CFP description, do specify if you need a projector or white board.

Proposal Sections

• Infrastructure
• Library
• Standard library
• Web Development
• Game programming, Philosophy

FAQ

Q: Who can give Open Space talk? - Professionals - Lecturers - College Students - Speakers

Q: My talk is not selected for conference, can I opt for Open Space?

A: Yes register here. This way people who are interested in the topic you proposed can catch up with you at the event itself.

Q:What is the screening process of Open Space talk?

A: No screening process, we are collecting information to facilitate logistics.

As we had announced earlier, we're having a Dev Sprint at this year's PyCon India. The registration are open now! Participation in Dev Sprint is completely free but the venue can accomodate only 150 participants. So, we will accept participants on a strictly First-Come, First-Serve basis.

Fill up this form to register yourself as a participant.

Last date of Registration - 24th September 2015.

Checkout the list of projects that we have for the Dev Sprint.

See you there!

Bam! The final schedule is out.

It has been quite a ride this year with all the volunteers and talk selection committee working quite hard to adhere to the dates that we announced at the very beginning. We can proudly say that we haven't missed any deadlines and things are moving forward according to plan. As you might have guessed, yep, this has only one inevitable outcome. An awesome PyCon India!

Just a slight boast. Curious to know who these volunteers are? We're right here!

Apart from the full schedule, we have the Dev Sprint, Poster session and Open spaces at this year's PyCon.

Make sure you check them all out and submit a proposal if you have something in mind.

As a final note, we've hit 1100+ registration and will close ticketing soon. If you haven't bought your ticket yet, this second would be the right time to do it. So don't wait and grab your tickets now!

See you folks in 3 weeks!

The PyCon India review panel has done an excellent job this year. You might have noticed this already when we published our selected workshops.

Today, we're proud to announce the first cut of our selected talks for this year's conference!

Checkout the selected talks.

That incentive enough to attend PyCon India? Oh, that reminds me, we've just hit 1000+ registrations! So if you don't want to miss out on all the fun, you might want to hurry up and book your tickets RIGHT AWAY!

Get your tickets now!

What is Poster Presentation?

Poster presentation/session is an informal way to present your ideas, or research information at the conference with an academic focus and reach out to a larger audience on your topic. Basically the poster presentations are different from the soft, projector based presentations, where the presenter/individual/speaker accompanies a poster, posts it on a black/white board in the space provided, stand there, talk to the rolling audience, explain the concept, take maximum questions on his topic. Each presentation is usually presented over a period of 10 minutes or more. Interestingly, at PyCon 2015, Bangalore, we’ll be having the Poster sessions and space will be reserved for the speakers to display their posters.

What is the Motivation behind it?

Oral presentations are a richer medium than written documents. They allow you to establish stronger contact with the audience and better convince them with your viewpoint through verbal and nonverbal methods, as well as the ensuing interaction. Posters also act as hard copies providing in-depth details of the concepts of a talk a speaker aims to spread, where any participant can look back incase he missed a few pointers during the talk.

Who can Participate?

• Professionals
• Lecturers
• College Students
• Speakers

How to submit Posters?

Through Junction: https://in.pycon.org/cfp/pycon-india-2015-poster-session/proposals/

What makes a good Poster Presentation?

First and most important, a good proposal. Poster sessions are intended to give you the chance to present interesting ideas and start conversations with others. Additionally, proposal titles and abstracts are one of the major tools the audience will use to identify posters of interest. Second, the poster itself. The poster is a visual aid for you to use in creating a quick engaging presentation, and to refer to it answering questions and fuelling discussion.

Rules and Guidelines:

Certain Rules and guidelines that are suggested for an ideal poster presentation include:

Define the purpose

Heading should convey the entire message of your idea

Your message

Sell your idea in seconds

Poster size

Not too big, not too small

Include Images, Graphs

It’ll make the presentation more informative

Presentation Index should look like:

• Title
• Introduction/Goal
• Methods
• Results
• Conclusion
• References
• Few links of your references for the audience to get proper enlightenment of your idea and to understand it thoroughly
• Acknowledgement
• Thanking the audience for their attention provides a nice segue into the question and answer session.

Poster selection is the beginning

Consider the post presentation impact of your topic.

QR Code

You do not have to use a QR, but it adds a level of professionalism to your work. It is often put in lower right hand corner with other contact information.

Literature Review

Existing systems. Advantage of your idea over them.

Writing Style

Proper fonts and colors wherever needed

Design, Layout

Poster content is always arranged in columns, on an invisible grid

FAQs

Q: Can I submit both a poster and a talk proposal?

A: Absolutely! We encourage everyone to submit a poster proposal even if they have also submitted a talk proposal. If both are accepted, we encourage authors to adapt their presentation to make the best use of each venue. Even if a talk proposal can not be accommodated by the program committee, it may still be well suited for a poster presentation.

OYO Rooms are providing a 20% discount on their rooms for PyCon India attendees. Here are the details:

• Coupon Code: OYOPYCON
• Flat discount of 20% and max upto INR 800 per room per night
• Check in start: 20/09/2015
• Check in end: 10/10/2015
• Coupon start date: 01/09/2015
• Coupon end date: 05/10/2015
• Valid for bookings through all Channels - Mobile-App, Website, Telephone & Email.
• Valid for stay in across India

For any further clarifications you may contact on the below mentioned details:

Subhendu Ghosh - Phone: +91 - 9711614670 - Email: subhendu.ghosh@oyorooms.com

Fly in and stay in style! Goibibo, one of PyCon India's Gold sponsors, is giving discounts for your ride and stay, when you book using their portal. Here are the details:

• Hotels: 50% upfront discount (upto a max of Rs. 2000) and 50% cashback (as promotional goCash upto a max of 8000 goCash)
• Flights: Flat Rs. 500 off for round trip on a minimum booking value of Rs. 5000
• Bus: Flat 100/- off on totalFare >= 1000

Registered participants will receive an email with the discount codes to be used for the booking. Remember though, a single code can be used for one hotel booking, one flight booking and one bus booking (yes, one code for three types of bookings). However, one code cannot be used for more than one hotel, or for more than one flight or for more than one bus booking.

In case you have any queries regarding the discounts, please tweet out to @goibibodotcom or mail them at pycon@goibibo.com.

The workshops at PyCon India will be held on 2nd October and are two and half hour long of hands-on sessions, so be sure not to miss it.

There will be three workshops running parallely in different Rooms, make sure that your interested Workshop(s) do not conflict.

There are a lot of choices when it comes to Workshop:

• Let's Learn Statistics by Bargava Subramanian

• Django Projects the Right way! by Saurabh Kumar

• Getting Started with Ansible by Aditya Patawari

• Reasoning under uncertainty with Python by Ronojoy Adhikakri

• Symbolic computation with Python using SymPy by Sumith Kulal

• Using devstack to contribute to OpenStack by Swapnil Kulkarni

• Thinking in Functions by Anoop Thomas Mathew

• Building NextGen IoT solutions using Python and Cloud by Abhishek Narian

• Python on your Mobile Phone (advanced concepts) by Akshay Aurora

More details about individual workshops available at PyConIndia2015-Proposals

Tickets to the Workshops are available at Here

Just under 2 months to go for this year's PyCon India. As we had announced earlier, this year we are holding Dev Sprints as a part of the conference. A big thank you, to all of you for filling out the form.

In case you are confused or if we sound too pretentious, think of Dev sprint as having a good time, coding hands-on with your fellow Python programmers. The atmosphere will be that of an intense one, extremely focused on projects, with mentors hanging around to help you overcome any roadblock that you might face. The usual outcome of these intense sprints are patches, bug fixes and numerous upstream pull requests from almost all the participants.

Been dreaming about contributing to open source projects? Well, look no further because there won't be a better chance than this. The Sprint will be held on Oct 2nd from 9Am - 7.30 PM on the 1st floor of the conference venue. We will open participant registrations next month.

Meanwhile, we have opened the CFP for the dev sprints!

If you have a project which you can mentor for, then please add your project and its description in the proposal page linked to above. Projects can include any personal ones that contribute to the Python ecosystem or mainstream projects such as CPython, Django, Flask, Pandas, SymPy etc. Be sure to make one proposal per project and also one proposal per mentor as well.

Once we close the CFP, we will make a list of the accepted projects and the participants will be able to choose from them while they participate in the event.

Oh, and if you have not purchased your conference tickets already, get them soon!

Ladies & Gentlemen,

There is always a need to identify figures whom the coming generations can look upto. For this purpose, and to encourage even further contributions, as well as to motivate the upcoming generations, we have been consistently awarding the Kenneth Gonsalves award for the past two years to worthy Indian Pythonistas.

Baiju Muthukadan was the first year's recipient. Last year, it was awarded to Prabhu Ramachandran.

This award is instituted by PSSI and PSF in the name of our late friend and mentor, Kenneth Gonsalves who passed away in August 2012. KG, as he is fondly known in the community, was the founder of the Indian Python Software Society. This award is for the ones who are doing exemplary work in Python programming language, its development/adoption/advocacy in India.

It is that time of the year, again, where we welcome nominations for a worthy candidate from all of you. If you know someone who has played a key role in the Indian Python community's development, please nominate their names. Do your part to help us find a deserving personality to accept the award this year.

Please submit your nominations here.

First of all, a big shout out to all those who worked on and submitted their talk proposals! 140 of them! Thanks to all of you, this year we have an excellent pool of talk and tutorials to select from. The standards have gone up a notch this year, but we are also taking time to work closely with the presenters in order to streamline the content as well as their presentations.

Even before the submissions were closed, the review panel was proactively reaching out to the presenters and now the process is in full swing! If you would like to help... No wait, you should help! There is no 'if'. Do visit the proposals page, vote for your favorite talks, comment on the ones that you would like to know more about and help us help you have the most awesome content ever.

Here is the section wise break up of the proposals that we received.

• Python 3k : 1

• Core Python : 11

• Embedded Python : 6

• Concurrency : 5

• Scientific Computing : 16

• Data Visualization and Analytics : 16

• Web Development : 19

• Security : 10

• Testing : 10

• Infrastructure : 23

• Network Programming : 5

• Others : 18

Hold on tight friends, it is going to be awesome this year!

Providing child care at PyCon India is something that has been on our minds for more than a few years now. Empowering the parents to attend the talks and network around the conference tension free, knowing that their children are in good hands. This year we've teamed up with professionals in order to make this happen and hope to give the kids a nice time as well during the conference!

If you would like to sign up for this service, please choose Yes for the question Would you like to avail Child care facility?, which will be asked during online registration.

While we'd love every parent attending the conference to take advantage of this service, we have to keep in mind the Venue bandwidth and man power as well. Those being taken into consideration, we only have 25 slots, which will be offered on a First Come First Serve basis. So if you would like to sign up for it, we suggest you to fill in your name right away!

We will personally start reaching out to the parents who have opted for this service a month before the conference in order to understand their specific expectations better. The fee for the service is Rs. 500 per day per child.

Just to add to that, why not give your kids a chance to watch their parents stand up and teach a lot of people? Go ahead and propose a session, will ya?

In case you have any queries, don't even hesitate a moment to reach out to contact@in.pycon.org.

When we say we strive to make PyCon India better, we mean it. Concentrating on talk qualities, being inclusive and then getting onto having top notch workshops, believe it or not, PyCon India has never had a Dev Sprint. That, my friends, is going to be fixed this year!

Do take a moment to fill up this 1-minute Dev sprint survey form.

We are planning on conducting Dev sprints all across India within Local User Groups starting from this month onwards. If you would like to participate or offer suggestions, please join the inpycon mailing list.

Tentatively, the plan is to hold the sprints on October 2nd, Friday, parallel to the workshops. We will make the announcement as soon as the plan is finalized.

Don't forget to grab your tickets and put in a talk proposal though!

Come one, come all, registrations for PyCon India is open y'all!

Register Now! Read the rest when you get back.

PyCon India is one of the most affordable and entirely community run professional conferences in India, and we strive to keep it that way. As much as we try, inflation is just something that we can't do much about and hence, the small changes will reflect. Here are the pricing tiers for this year's conference:

1. Early Python : Rs. 1000 (150 tickets. No cancellation. Transferable)
2. Regular Python : Rs. 1200
3. Late Python : Rs. 1800
4. Student Python : Rs. 1000
5. On-the-spot Python : Rs. 2500 (For two days)
6. Workshop Python : Rs. 1000 Per workshop

Tickets 1 to 5 gives you full access to the conference for two days, including breakfast, lunch, tea & snacks and a T-shirt. The workshop ticket has to be bought separately for each workshop that you want to attend. We'll announce them as soon as we finalize them.

Get your tickets right away!

If you would like to talk Python at the conference, take a look at our Proposal submission page. Put in a rough draft right away. You can think about prettifying it later on. Submissions deadline is on the 31st of May.

Cheers folks! Hope to see you at PyCon India!

PyCon India is a community event. Here each and every task is done by a volunteer. And here is the opportunity for You to be a part of the community.

But before you register to volunteer, there are few things you should be aware of -

• Volunteering takes time and effort, sometimes a lot of it. For online activities like handling social networks or handling registrations etc take a lot of time. And sometimes rapid decisions have to be made. So if you're volunteering, make sure you have the time. If you're unavailable at certain time period of the day, let us know beforehand.

• If you're volunteering for offline activities e.g. on spot registration or settings up stages or handling video recording, anything that has to be done on the venue during the event, there is a good chance that you won't be able to attend the sessions you just registered for. If someone needs you, you have to be there.

• Volunteering is not a free way into the event. At PyCon India, everybody buys tickets. Even the event organizers buy tickets. We volunteer because we love Python and PyCon, and want the event to be awesome.

• Volunteers are the most important part of the event. Without the volunteers, the event cannot happen. So even if you are attending PyCon for the first time, we encourage you to volunteer with whatever you can. If you don't want to miss any sessions, then volunteer for smaller tasks.

If you're still interested in volunteering, subscribe to the mailing list. Please don't subscribe to the daily digest. Digests are always behind the time and meant for those who just wants to stay updated and not participate in conversations. If you're already subscribed to the mailing list, go ahead, login and change your subscription type. Also, please don't reply to a digest.

Once your name is on the form, keep an eye on the mailing list. Threads will be created on specific tasks asking for volunteers. If you think you can do the task and have enough time for it, raise your hand. That's it.

Also, if you have any question, we'd really appreciate if you go through the mailing list archives first, and see if it's already answered. If not, you can talk to us at the IRC channel #pyconindia on freenode.net or send a mail to the mailing list.

Hope to see you at the event. Happy volunteering. :)

PyCon India 2015 is happening on Oct 2, 3, 4. Call For Proposals is open!

You can submit a talk or workshop in any of the following sections

• Python 3k
• Core Python
• Embedded Python
• Concurrency
• Scientific Computing
• Data Visualization
• Analytics
• Web Development
• Security
• Testing
• Network Programming
• Infrastructure

Talks are generally 40 minutes and workshops are hands on session for 2 hours and 30 minutes duration. You can submit a new proposal here.

Guidelines for submitting proposal

• Proposal should have objective with clear expectation for audience.
• Proposal description should be short and to the point.
• Proposal should have proper prerequisites like environment setup, library version.
• No proposal will be selected without link to appropriate session content like presentation, pdf, code snippets etc ...
• Proposal content links can be updated later.
• Proposal content should adhere to code of conduct.
• Proposal content shouldn't have company name through out the content. Mention of employer is allowed only in the beginning of the content (presentation/pdf).
• Background image/wallpaper shouldn't contain company name/logos.

This time our submission system allows the proposal to be in draft mode. As a result, you can tweak the write up before making it public.

FAQ

Q: Who can propose a session ?

A: Anyone who works on python irrespective of the experience.

Q: I am first time speaker, can I propose session ?

A: Yes. We accept proposals from everyone.

Q: Will someone help me fine tune the content ?

A: Yes, we have set of reviewers who will review the content and give feedback from time to time.

Q: Can I upload the content later ?

A: Yes, it is advised to start with rough draft and iterate rather than postponing to last minute.

Go ahead and propose a session.

Buckle up people, the PyCon India 2015 ride is here! Mark your calendars for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of October 2015. We have already launched our website last month, announced our call for sponsorship and just recently opened the call for proposals.

As you can see, we have started the prep early to make sure we take this year's conference a notch above last year's. With over a 1000 attendees last time, we are sure to hit house full this year as well, the upper limit being ~1200, which is, sadly, the conference venue's maximum capacity.

If you have a company, or work at one who would be interested in meeting one of the most enthusiastic Python crowds, then be sure to check out the sponsorship details. Apart from that, this is an opportunity for you to give back and show your support for the community's growth as well.

In case you are brimming with excitement about teaching or talking about anything Python, no matter whether you started yesterday or have been using Python for a decade, make sure you put in a talk proposal. No one became an expert in a day - neither at presenting nor at programming. So don't be shy and don't think too much. Just put in a proposal, yes, right now!

Here are a few important dates to keep in mind. We shall try our best to adhere to these dates, but hey, as you know, all of us are volunteers here.

Registration

• Opens : May 15th.

• closes : September 20th.

• Note : Ticket cancellations will not be allowed beyond September 20th. Also, registration is limited by the venue capacity and hence, might close sooner.

Sponsorship

• Opens : March 7th.
• Closes : September 1st.

Call for proposals

• Opens : March 7th.
• Closes : May 31st.
• Last date to upload final presentation : July 15th.
• Talk acceptance : September 15th.
• Final schedule : September 20th.

That's about it folks. Spread the word, talk about it, let your friends and family know, and let's make this year's conference the best one ever!