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Proposal for 2010

Page history last edited by Michael Langford 15 years, 11 months ago

 

 

What makes Atlanta a good place to hold a conference?

 

Conference Rooms and Hotel Rooms

 

Atlanta, simply put, is a conference town. We have a huge number of conventions hosted here for any major US city. There is a reason we are so popular: We have large venue after large venue, and plentiful hotels and restaurants along the centrally located MARTA rapid transit system (which connects directly to the Airport and all major conference areas.
 
Additionally, Atlanta is a hub for Delta Airlines, as well as a major airport for international connecting flights. Atlanta offers a huge concentration of urban universities and other educational institutes, from Morehouse College to Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. The conference can be held in the city center, as it is full of conference venues and hotels extremely well suited (and priced) for this endeavor.
 
There are many conference spaces in the urban centers in the City of Atlanta. We're looking at both the Midtown and Downtown hotel regions. There are at least 7 hotels downtown that can handle 400-2000 guest conferences, and many more rooms in other hotels across the street from the conference (in one of the other hotels in the cluster). Hotels here include The Westin, The Hilton, The Hyatt, and The Omni as well as others.
 
There are several hotels in the Midtown area as well that are conference centers as well. This is the area we would prefer to perform the conference in, as it has a more vibrant after hours scene, while having nearly as many large and mid sized conference capable hotels. Hotels capable of hosting a conference here include the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center, The W, The Georgian Terrace , and The Wyndham as well as others.
 
In addition to hotels, there are several conference centers (usually across the street from one or more hotels), which can host even larger sessions. The whole event does not have to be in the same building if there is a gangbusters attendance. We have the utmost flexibility to host any amount of people and any mix of sessions. In addtion, this is one of the most affordable cities to actually have the conference in the city. It isn't like with a town like Chicago where hosting in the city could be prohibitively expensive. Comparable or smaller charges to PyCon's suburban setting this year can be obtained within the city itself.
 
Transportation
 
The Atlanta Airport is a short ride away via the MARTA rapid transit rail system. It is the method most Atlantans use to get to the airport when we go.  MARTA has train stops in both Midtown and Downtown Atlanta, near both prospective sites. Addtionally, Atlanta has zoned taxi transport, so all taxi fees are a known quantity when traveling around down. For instance, the "Midtown Zone" is $8 between any two points, regardless of distance within the zone. Additionally, copious restuarants and playhouses and bars and clubs are all available a short walk from all the hotels and the two sites.
 
Past Conferences
 
Many Textile and Carpet Convetions
DragonCon
SEC Basketball Tournament
SEC Football Championship Game
2007 NCAA Final Four
SANS Atlanta
Women's Leadership  Exchange
Employee Assistance Professional Conference
 
 

Weather

 

Weather is in the 50's in Febuary, to the 70's throughout April. This is the dryer portion of the year, raining only intermittently for the most part.

 

 

 Things to Do
 
1 Atlanta Ballet
2 Atlanta Botanical Garden
3 Atlanta Braves and Turner Field
4 Atlanta Civil War History
5 Atlanta Falcons at the Georgia Dome
6 Atlanta Hawks and Atlanta Thrashers at Philips Arena
7 Atlanta History Center
8 Atlanta Motor Sports
9 Atlanta Opera
10 Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chastain Park Amphitheatre
 
11 Atlanta University Center and the Historic West End
12 Atlanta Walking Tours
13 Atlantic Station
14 Discounts Galore
15 See a Broadway Show
16 Buckhead, A Luxurious Experience
17 Centennial Olympic Park
18 Center for Puppetry Arts
19 Chattahoochee River Fun

20

Chateau Élan Winery & Resort
 
21 City of Decatur
22 Inside CNN Studio Tour
23 Dine Out
24 Let’s Do Downtown Year Round
25 Fernbank Museum of Natural History
26 Festivals Galore
27 The Georgia Aquarium
28 Georgia’s History Under the Gold Dome
29 Golf in Atlanta
30 The Gone With the Wind Experience

 

 
31 A New High Museum of Art for Atlanta
32 Imagine It! The Children’s Museum of Atlanta
33 Jimmy Carter Library and Museum
34 Marietta Historic District
35 Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site and Sweet Auburn District
36 Midtown, The Heart of the Arts.
37 NEW World of Coca-Cola
38 Piedmont Park
39 Roswell Historic District
40 School's in for Culture

 

 
41 City Segway Tours
42 Shop Until You Drop
43 Six Flags Over Georgia & Six Flags White Water
44 Stone Mountain Park
45 Find Theater at its Best
46 Underground Atlanta
47 Virginia-Highland
48 William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum
49 Yellow River Game Ranch and Kangaroo Conservation Center

50

Zoo Atlanta
Why should Atlanta and PyAtl should host this event?
 
Noah Gift, the organizer for PyAtl, along with Michael Langford and many others are volunteering and willing to put in serious hours to make this conference not only come to Atlanta, but to reach new heights to satify the ever growning python community and its need to develop some of the most fasinating software out there. PyAtl who is merely leading the push for the bid, is the largest Python User Group that uses meetup.com. We have at a minimum 20 people at every monthly meeting, and more typcially 40-50 attendees.
 
Our group has many active members of the Python Community, and we are the user group in the Atlanta area. We are also involved in sprints as well as helping to coordinate a cross coast WSGI?Pylongs/TG2 sprint at the end of May. Due to both the size, wide pervasiveness in the Atlanta technical community and dedication of our members, we believe we could provide 50-100 volunteers to perform work on this conference. Of course many would satisfy minor roles, but several key players have already expressed willingness to perform large tasks related to the conference. If you look at the sign up list you will see some of the areas people are starting to volunteer for.
 

Specific planning and coordination experience

 

Michael Langford organized a historically money losing, several hundred person regional conference, and ended up in the black

Jonathan LaCour organized a large event

Chris Calloway arranges many large events for TriZPUG

Noah Gift has organized several small python events as well as growing the PyAtl meetup group to its current size

In addition, there are several people who have played signifigant roles organizing events in the greater technial and open source world, from Open Spaces conferences, Plone Sprints, IEEE, etc. This list includes Doug Hellmann, Brandon Craig Rhodes, Cary Hull, Derek Richardson, Rick Thomas, Mark Kalmes, and Barry Hawkins, along with others.

 

Local User Groups

 

In addtion to the PyAtl group detailed above, we have a reasonably large Zope/Plone/Grok community, plus a university group. There are many lead developers for major python web frameworks in the area.

 

Exciting Python Using Companies in Atlanta

 

CCP North America, creators of Eve Online, are building a new massivly multiplayer online game here...in python

Georgia Tech Research Institute creates many military system testing software systems...in python

The main news paper, the AJC as well as Cox use Django, which is of course....in python

Racemi manages a whole datacenter...using software written in python

There are many startups such as ShootQ (Turbogears2), Bravadosoft (Pylons), Predixtic (Turbogears), as well as many consulting companies such as ifPeople.

 

Many of these have expressed interest in sponsorships already.

 

Local Tech Community

 

Turner Broadcasting

CNN

Boeing

Scientific Atlanta

Earthlink

Georgia Tech

Coca-Cola

Home Depot

Scientific Research Corporation

Flextronics

Bank of America

Emory University

IBM

General Electric

ISS

UPS

 

Many do use python and have attendees to the PyAtl meetings from time to time. Others have not, while others still have reached out via employees to see what python offers to them to improve their operations.

 

 

In closing

 

We have are a dynamic and motivated group of Python programmers and are passionate about bringing this event to Atlanta.  In addition, Atlanta probably provides the best total package:

  • Tons of technology companies
  • Tons of Python programmers
  • Tons of enthusiatic and helpful Python programmers
  • Awesome City to hang out in
  • Reasonable Costs
  • Awesome weather
  • Noah Gift, is a bundle of energy.  I would be a great resource to tap :)
  • Atlanta has an extremely large Python Media Presence including several O'Reilly bloggers, O'Reilly authors, and general authors such as Doug Hellmann with Python Magazine.

 

 

 If any portion of this bid is at all vague, or in otherwise in need of detail, please let us know. We would love to provide more information to you through more details in a presentation such as this, or via a conference call or individual phone call, or via email.

 

     --Noah Gift, Michael Langford, and PyATL on behalf of all pythonistas of Atlanta

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