[Events] PyStar Philly in the press

[Christine Spang]

On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 12:07:29PM -0400, Jessica McKellar wrote:
> Dana, Christine, et al: I'd love to hear your thoughts on the event, lessons
> learned, etc. once you've had time to decompress!

I don't have a ton to to say, but here goes.

Dana and Azavea's prep made all the logistics go extremely smoothly. We
had no computer, projector, food, or networking problems.

The attendees seemed to have a higher level of programming / computer
familiarity than we've had at the Boston Python Workshop, which I expect
is just a matter of advertising and that the workshop will be able to
attract more newer people in the future. People still appreciated having
a from-the-beginning lecture intro.

The project afternoon was very freeform and we didn't use any of the
project modules from the Boston Python Workshop (as far as I'm aware).
People broke up into small groups in breakout rooms and worked on things
ranging from tutorials about functions and classes to working on free
software project bugs to graphics to helping one of the attendees with
her linguistics research. People were very good about coming up with
things to work on. We had a high staff-to-attendee ratio which made
having very small diverse groups work well.

I think the main things to work on from a volunteer perspective in the
future are reaching out to people who might want to attend who have an
even more basic level of computer familiarity, and really practicing at
catching the use of jargony computer terms that don't make any sense to
beginners (and explaining the words before using them).

The atmosphere was very friendly and energizing---I'm super glad I went!
Christine