Tell Us About Your User Group

The Python Software Foundation is conducting an international survey of Python User Group organizers to help us better serve the large and ever-expanding Python User Group community.

The survey contains questions on user group organization, events, demographics, and growth. There are some questions with numerical answers, and while your best guess is fine, you may find it helpful to gather some statistics on your user group membership before starting the survey (example statistics include the number of active members and the size and topics for recent user group events).

We expect this survey to take around 30 minutes to complete. We appreciate your time and honesty in answering these questions.

This survey was written by Jessica McKellar, organizer for the Boston Python Meetup, and Jesse Noller, PSF board member and PyCon chair.

User group organizers, please click here to begin the survey.

Finding a local users' group

Do you belong to a local or regional Python users' group? Is your group included in the list on the Python.org wiki? Sign your group up today so new members can find you!

Add your name to the appropriate geographic section, and include a link to your home page so prospective members will know where to go to find more details. If your group does not have a web site, blog, or mailing list to link to, just include the relevant details right on the wiki page (where do you meet? when?).

Regional Conference Grants

As part of the ongoing work to make Python conferences more widely accessible, the PSF Board has awarded grants to two regional conferences to help with their expenses.

PyCon PL 2009 is being planned for 16-18 October in Ustroń, Poland. The first PyCon PL last year had 130 attendees and 13 separate talks. With the move to the new location this year, Filip Kłębczyk and the other organizers are preparing for at least 160 participants and have added an extra day to allow for more talks. They are also adding a lightning talks session.

The pyArkansas 2009 conference (pyAR) is planned for November 14th. It will be hosted on the campus of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas, in the United States. The one day program includes four tracks covering topics ranging from beginning programming to Django and Twisted.

Supporting Python user groups

Advocacy coordinator Jeff Rush has created some new mailing lists and resources for usergroup organizers, described in his post to the Python Advocacy weblog. To summarize:

• a weblog for usergroup event reports
• a mailing list for usergroup organizers, group-organizers
• an updated list of usergroups (it's in the wiki, so be sure your local group is there)

Jeff also suggests that groups can market themselves by writing articles or recording video of presentations at their meetings. Please see his post for more.