Daniel Davies

Wednesday morning's keynote, about language architecture, was given by Bruce Eckel. The talk was proceeded by a brief overview of open spaces. These are beginning to seriously catch-on in Birmingham, and as a developer, I'm even more excited because they firmly have their roots set in the development community. Unfortunately, no one is quite doing them right around here. And because of that, they are devalued, and generally lead to the same things being said by the same people over and over.

The first point about an open space is that any participant is free to run a panel. There is a white board, with a grid of times and rooms, and people use post-it notes to write what their talk is about. This allows good flexibility; if two people are talking about similar things at similar times their panels can be combined to give more scope and discussion. It also makes every unconference completely unique because you will rarely have the same topic presented in the same way.

To quote Bruce Eckel, "If you have time to make up pretty boards its not an unconference"

This leads to a further positive consequence; a prepared talk won't work in these scenarios. If you are giving a talk, and someone else approaches you about co-hosting it and you're set in a rigid plan your talk will be skewed. A prepared presentation is highly frowned upon, it limits the discussion and prevents a very useful tangent from emerging.

Finally, the Law of Two Feet. If something's not working for you, use your feet, get up, and go somewhere else. Sitting in a talk that wasn't what you thought it was, or have little interest in is not good for you, or for the people in the talk. Get up and go to something you can contribute on.

This year Pycon UK wasn't going to go ahead. It was announced in this talk that there would in fact be a Pycon UK this year, in Birmingham. And it will be an unconference!