gistfile1.txt

With some generosity from Cars.com thanks to Michael Ryabushkin, a
contribution of space from PyCon thanks to Jesse Noller, and some prompting
by Doug Hellmann, if we can get some attendance, we'll able to have a "Web
Development Summit" at PyCon in Santa Clara this year.  It will take place on
one of the two "tutorial days" before the conference.  It will not compete
with the language summit (that will be on a different day).

The original idea for this took shape as a Google+ post:

"""
It's hard not to notice that the Python Web-SIG mail list is very
low-traffic; surprising given how much Python is used in the web world. It
may be that no one likes to participate unless there's a contentious issue,
or it might be due to balkanization in the Python web community.
Communicating over the web is pretty impersonal and just kind of hard in
general; it's much easier to stick with what you know than to try new things
and become a member of a different community.

PyCon is great, but it tends to be so large that folks tend to clump into
their own brand-oriented packs without taking the opportunity to talk much
with people from the other packs. Rounding the wagons is also usually kind of
necessary, because for some, PyCon acts as a summit where communities sort of
get together once a year anyway, and there's often not enough bandwidth for
folks to really talk to people they don't already know pretty well.

What'd be really cool is to have a little miniconference of just the folks
who produce Web-oriented Python software (frameworks, applications,
libraries). An attendance of fewer than maybe 50 would be great, with good
representation from members of the major web frameworks, apps, and libraries.

In particular, at such a minconference, I think it would be really fun and
useful to get together and do the following things:

- Present your worst software design decision, and its impact. How would
  you do it differently today?

- Present your best software design decisions, and their impacts.

- Present your findings while building an application in a system
  that you generally don't use "in anger".

- Present a talk on some obscure corner of your system that you find
  really cool, but that you can't talk about in polite company.

- State-of/future-of sorts of talks about particular frameworks, applications, 
  libraries.

- Participate in a panel about a topic (e.g. "reusable applications",
  "deployment").
"""

It would be great to get some of the "core committer" type folks from the
Python web community involved in the summit.  That's why you're receiving
this email.  It's my intent to mail at least one contributor from each of the
following communities: Django, Web2Py, Zope 2, Grok, Bluebream.Zope 3,
Turbogears, Twisted, WebCore, Flask, Bobo, Cherrypy, Webob, GAE, web.py,
WSGI, mod_wsgi (if there are any major communities you believe I've missed in
this list, please let me know).

Without a clear "BDFL of the web", I suspect this day needs a bit more
structure than the Python "language summit", which seems pretty free-wheeling
and loose; without some structure we'll end up wondering why we're there.
But it's also true that the hallway track is more important than the actual
formal content.  So, with those things in mind, I propose a schedule
something like the below.

9:00  - 9:15 Introduction

9:15  - 10:00 Creating a Better Deployment Story (panel)

10:15 - 11:00 Porting to Python 3 (panel)

11:15 - 12:00 Factoring Code for Reuse (panel)

12:00 - 1:00 lunch

1:00  - 2:00 State-Of <insert your framework/app/library here> Multi-Talk
             (10 minutes on your stuff, max of 6 participants)

2:15  - 3:00 Promoting Python for Web Use (panel)

3:15  - 5:00 Lightning talks (5 minutes apiece)

Better suggestions for structure and/or content are welcome, this is just my
own proposal.

I know this is pretty last-minute, and you may have already made travel plans
that might preclude it, but please consider attending.  I think it'll be a
good opportunity to give the various groups in the Python web space a chance
to communicate in meatspace.  If you're amenable to it, I'd love to get
your committment to do one (or a few) of the following:

- Participate in one of the panels.

- Prepare a ten-minute state-of talk.

- Volunteer to moderate one of the panels.

- Prepare a lightning talk (suggestions: good and bad design decisions in
  your project, cool corner areas of your project).