[NTLUG:Announce] Announcement: Python Conference Coming to Dallas Soon

[Low-traffic NTLUG announcement list]

Greetings.  I'm the co-chair for an upcoming volunteer-run conference in the 
Dallas (Addison) area and would like to get an announcement into the hands of 
your members in some manner acceptable to your community.

The event is the fifth international Python Conference, being held Feb 23-25, 
2007 at the Marriott-Quorum in Addison, with early-bird registration ending ** 
Jan 15 **.

The conference draws approximately 400-500 attendees from diverse backgrounds 
such as scientists from national and medical labs, college/K-12 educators, web 
engineers and the myriad of IT developers and programming hobbyists.  Those 
new to the Python language are welcome, and we're offering a half-day "Python 
101" tutorial on the day before the conference, Thursday Feb 22 to help you 
get up to speed and better enjoy the rest of the conference.

Our talks cover a wide range of topics I believe would be of interest to your 
members, such as:

   - Web Frameworks Panel
   - Accessing and serving scientific datasets with Python
   - pyweek: making games in 7 days
   - Easy creation of interactive tutorials
   - Visual Python in a Computational Physics Course
   - Python for Students of the Modern World
   - Advanced databases with SQLAlchemy
   - Interactive Parallel and Distributed Computing with IPython

Being run by the Python community as a non-profit event, the conference 
strives to be inexpensive, with registration being only $260 (or $195 if you 
register prior to Jan 15th), with a further discount for students.  On the day 
before the conference we are running a full day of classroom tutorials (extra 
charge per class) and then after the conference is a free four-days of 
sprints, which are informal gatherings of programmers to work together in 
coding on various projects.  Sprints are excellent opportunities to do agile 
pair-programming side-by-side with experienced programmers and make new friends.

Other activities are lightning talks, which are 5-minute presentations to show 
off a cool technology or spread the word about a project, open space talks, 
which are spontaneous gatherings around a topic and, new this year, a Python 
Lab where experienced and novice programmers will work together to solve 
challenging problems and then present their solutions.

The conference is also running four keynote talks by leaders in the 
programming field, with a special focus on education this year:

   "The Power of Dangerous Ideas: Python and One Laptop per Child"
      by Ivan Krstic, senior member of the One Laptop per Child project

   "Premise: eLearning does not Belong in Public Schools"
      by Adele Goldberg, of SmallTalk fame

   "Python 3000"
      by Guido van Rossum, creator of Python

   "The Importance of Programming Literacy"
      by Robert M. "r0ml" Lefkowitz, a frequent speaker at O'Reilly conferences

I believe your members will find the conference educational and enjoyable. 
More information about the conference along with the full schedule of 
presentations with abstracts, is available online:

   http://us.pycon.org/

Thanks for any help you can give in spreading the word,

Jeff Rush
Co-Chair PyCon 2007