On July 13th, DjangoCon 2008 was announced, and the illusion and nervousness started for many djangonauts. The main problem here, is that due to the lack of time and experience, the number of attendees is limited to 200. That makes sense, but there are other things that doesn't make sense to me. This post is about that, and it's intended to be a kind of constructive criticism.
The fact is that many people is waiting to know if he/she can get a ticket to start planning the trip to SF, ans specially to purchase flight tickets. In those two weeks since DjangoCon announcement, flight prices from Barcelona to SF have increased in a 30%. I don't think it's the only case.
My question is... It is so difficult to develop and run an application to register users, letting many djangonauts to save some money that could be given to the DSF? :) Are you coding it in PHP? ;)
Seriously, if you need help, just ask for it, we are a community. But please, stop delaying ticket releasing, we have to get our tickets, make our plans, and we don't want to waste our money getting last time flight tickets. IMHO ticket realising should be priority #1.
Finally I want to comment something else here in my blog, that previously submitted to DjangoCon organization. Program isn't closed, and probably this is planned and will be added later, but don't you think that BoF sessions are a must in the DjangoCon? I think that we should take profit of being all togheter, to discuss freely any subject about Django, or any related topic.
Tickets are going out on the 31st at 12PM. Check here for more information:
ReplyDeletehttp://djangocon.org/
Snippet:
We will be releasing two batches of tickets, consisting of 100 tickets each (200 in total). The first set of tickets will be released at 12:00pm - Thursday, 31st July 2008 and the second set of tickets will be released at 6:00pm - August 1st, 2008. On those dates/times an obvious register button should appear in the site!
While I appreciate your comments, I'm not entirely sure I like the tone.
ReplyDeleteConferences take around 6 months to plan, and thus far i've had about a month to get things together. Everyone is working pretty hard to make sure that the conference is enjoyable for the 200 that get to go, but also for everyone who can't make it as well.
While I appreciate that prices increase over time, we honestly can't move any faster than we are. It's not just about throwing up a registration site and that's it. There's a lot more to it than that. We simply haven't got time to build our own registration system this year.
All I can say is be patient. We've already announced the dates and times that tickets will be released, which David pointed out. We know what our priorities are and what we have left to do, and we're doing our best to give an awesome conference to the community in such a short space of time.
Also, the program is closed, we're just finalising a few details before committing them to the live site. BOF are not included in this conference, purely because we're stretched as it is.
Robert beat me to it.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking as the person who wrote the registration software for PyCon US, and as one of the volunteer organizers of that conference, its no where near as easy as you make it sound.
Kudo's to all the people who are making this happen in such an insane time frame. Only wish I could go.
In my oppinion, marc didn't mean to criticize the people behind the djangocon, but to write some lines about something a lot of people probably think too. That is, for people outside the US the later we now if we will have a ticket, the harder (or more expensive) it would be for us to get the flying tickets (but, hey, everybody realizes that).
ReplyDeleteOf course this is not Robert's fault, as he (for sure) is having enough work to do, but I'm sure every djangonaut outside the US is worried about the very same thing now, "each day the flying tickets will be more expensive, and getting the tickets now wouldn't be a good idea, cause I could end myself without the opportunity to be there".
Anyway, as Doug wrote in the previous comment, thnx to Robert and everyone that is working hard to make it happen. (I'll meet you there! :D)
Ok, it looks like my post sounded offensive to DjangoCon organizers, and I just have to say, that it was my last intention.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine that organizing an event like this is a huge amount of work, and even the registration application I was joking about; I'm sure that it'll be difficult to program or modify anything to make sure that it behaves fair for everybody trying to register, specially because we all are programmers (and probably I'm not the only one that was wondering how to hack it to get one ticket ;)
So my apologies for everybody that felt unrecognized on his work, or just uncomfortable with my post; I just wanted to give the point of view of many people, in a funny way.
Hope to see you there! (if I'm not still banned, and flight tickets doesn't increase more ;)