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Announcing the PyCon 2016 Talks Schedule

The Talks committee has been hard at work since the Call For Proposals closed 5 weeks ago, and today we are thrilled to present the result — here are the talks that the committee has chosen for PyCon 2016 in Portland, Oregon!

https://us.pycon.org/2016/schedule/

Every committee member is a volunteer who has given the conference many hours of their own time to make PyCon an event that serves the Python community. They were helped along in the process this year by the new talk selection web app that the committee chair wrote. The app lets people read proposals and cast votes whenever they find the time, instead of making them attend pre-scheduled meetings online. We hope this made participation possible for Python community members whose work schedule, family situation, or time zone made it difficult or impossible to help select talks in previous years.

As always, the committee faced a daunting task with determination:

  • The talks committee received 528 talk proposals
  • They knew the conference only has room for 95 talks
  • 45 people served on this year’s talks committee

In the first round of review, each proposal was evaluated on its own, against a fixed set of criteria:

  • The committee offered 11,371 votes
  • They nominated 123 proposals directly into the second round
  • They wrote 1,322 messages
  • Of those, 298 were feedback to the author
  • Every proposal received 11 or more reviews
  • 6 committee members managed to review every single proposal!

In the second round of review, proposals were grouped by topic, and committee members selected the best few talks from each batch:

  • 319 proposals made it into the second round
  • They were grouped into 68 batches
  • The committee offered 1,675 votes
  • They wrote 299 more messages
  • 34 voters participated
  • Every batch received 15 or more reviews
  • The result was 95 talks that fit PyCon’s schedule!

The conference offers its thanks to this year’s Talks committee Chair and Co-Chair, Ned Jackson Lovely and Karen Rustad Tölva, as well as to every committee member who worked long hours to make this process succeed. We were also helped along in keeping a tight schedule by the many speakers who submitted their proposal well before the deadline, which let the committee get to work early and start their review process before the Call for Proposals was even closed.

We look forward to making more schedule announcements in the coming two weeks — the list of keynote speakers, the poster presentations, and the slate of tutorials. Stay tuned!

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