The Python room at the FOSDEM is going to be great, it was announced today: https://fosdem.org/2013/schedule/track/python/
My topics of interest:
- How do event loops work in Python? (by the pyuv author)
- Visualisation of public available FlightData
- Experimentation in porting the Go concurrency model to Python
I'll also present Vaurien, the tool we're building at Mozilla.
My only regret is that we don't have any women as speakers.
Since I am part of the organizers team, I tried to communicate towards women and encourage them to submit talks, but out of all our proposal we did not have any.
I've also discovered it can be quite hard to promote diversity. I had an invited blog post on the Pycon blog here: http://pycon.blogspot.fr/2012/12/cfp-for-python-room-at-fosdem-2013.html and I've eventually discovered that my last sentence was changed by the blog maintainers.
it was:
Everyone is welcome and we specifically encourage women to submit talks!
and it became:
Everyone is welcome and we encourage everyone to submit talks!
While I can't understand why I was not warned about this change, I can understand that some people don't want to ignite yet another war on diversity etc. When I asked about this change I was told it was made to make things "easier for me" - so I just asked to be removed from the list of authors and just moved along.
But I (and I don't engage other FOSDEM organizers here, these are my own actions) think that sentence was fine even if it could have been worded better.
I'm also completely ready to take any kind of heat about my actions in promoting diversity.
And I feel a bit ashamed the FOSDEM Python room will be 100% men speakers (unless of course I am making mistakes about finding out the genre of each first names in the list).
If I am still involved next year, I'll try to do better - and find the right allies to push on diversity.