Going abroad

I have had the opportunity to attend PyCon APAC 2014 held in Taipei over the last weekend. As the chairman for PyCon Singapore this year, I was very interested to learn how other countries organized PyCon in the APAC region (while controlling my excitement for attending my first overseas conference).

Parts of the conference that I found interesting will be summarized here followed by my own thoughts as a fellow conference organizer. Pardon any grammatical errors as I am doing my best to write things down before I forget them.

Conference registration

Over 600 people attended the conference which was held at the Humanities and Social Science Building within Academia Sinica. This was the largest APAC conference since last year’s APAC conference in Japan, which was attended by over 500 people.

Regardless of the conference, one big headache for both attendees and organizers is definitely registration. For this conference, attendees were split into four different registration queues using their phone numbers. For example, if your phone number (provided when purchasing the ticket) ends with 012, you would belong to the 0 ~ 400 queue. This was a particularly interesting scheme because I have no idea how the distribution of phone numbers looked like. By 9am, I noticed that there were still a number of attendees who were in their respective queues waiting to get their tote bag and name tag. I suppose that coming on time is never a good idea when attending a (huge) conference.

Meanwhile in Singapore, we only have a single registration counter to handle 200+ attendees; at times a long queue would form but never to the state where attendees would complain.

Conference hall and rooms

The number of attendees exceeded the capacity for the main hall used for Keynotes and lightning talks so some of us had to move to a higher platform at the back for a seat. Most of us were unaware that the smaller conference rooms used for talks had a live-cast of keynotes - I only found out during the second day when I forgot that there was a keynote and waited for a regular talk to begin. I do not recall hearing any announcements made about the live-cast. Then again, the microphone volume was quite soft at the rear end of the conference hall so I most likely missed the announcement.

Each of the conference rooms could hold a varying number of people. R0, the conference hall is the largest while R3 is the smallest and can only hold up to 36 people. Some of the more popular talks were unfortunately scheduled to be in R3 and it became too packed (I missed out a couple of talks because I was too slow).

This really is not the fault of the organizers because it is really really hard to predict the popularity of certain talks and they are also constrained by the number of rooms available at the conference venue. I wonder if a “I am interested in attending this talk” polling system would help alleviate the situation. It might complicate the scheduling of talks though.

Recreation hall

The recreation hall is an interesting place. Sponsors setup their booths here and there is even free tea provided to all attendees by Wolftea (琅茶), a startup based in Taiwan (my personal favourite is their 果韻鐵觀音 or Tieguanyin). Conference attendees in Singapore would most likely go for coffee though (NesCafe capsule machines come to mind). From what I gather, tea is very much still a popular choice of drink there despite the invasion of Starbucks and cafes. I loved the tea so much that I bought two packs of 鐵觀音 back to enjoy. Too bad they do not ship to Singapore.

A long row of refreshments were made available at the recreation hall which greatly helped seal it as THE “chat corridor” where tons of interactions between attendees took place. Many attendees also spoke to the sponsors as they were within arm’s reach at the same recreation hall. Our past PyCons in Singapore had sponsors within the main conference hall and there was tons of missed opportunities for sponsors and attendees to interact. Hopefully we can get it right this year at our new conference venue.

APAC Community Panel

One key reason for attending this PyCon was the APAC Community Panel held after the second day’s keynote. The panel, consisting of PyCon organizers from the APAC region (Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and Korea) was unsurprisingly attended by only a small number of conference attendees. The interaction between each of the panel members showed that most organizers agreed in principles of how APAC should be held. Nonetheless, the devil’s in the details. There were still plenty of issues everyone of us had to work out as PyCon APAC goes forward.

Beng Keat, who started the Python User Group Singapore represented us. While most would say it should really have been me since I have been elected to be the President of the user group, there were still plenty of matters and issues discussed that I were not fully aware yet, such as funding and sponsorship within the region. This was a great learning opportunity for me since Beng Keat has been at the helm with the APAC initiative since years ago. His thoughts of how subsequent APAC should proceed was especially enlightening (he had years to ponder about them!).

Things I missed out

I had to miss out Birds of Feathers because some tourism had to be done on the first day - Shilin night market was waiting. Some BoF sessions continued late into through the night so it was a pity that I missed some of them (especially the educators one).

Due to my poor memory, I missed out on the poster session as well. We do not have poster sessions in Singapore so I originally wanted to take a look and see how and where it was held.

Language

As this was my first trip to Taiwan, I was mildly concerned whether my Mandarin ability is sufficient for me to get around. Turns out that watching tons of Taiwan entertainment shows while young does help a lot. Okay, maybe reading Chinese novels helped a lot too.

I had to mentally remap some words and phrases before I start speaking, such as 德士 -> 计程车. A similar example in English would be Taxi -> Cab, which is a fun mental exercise for me.

Despite using English for most day to day conversations in Singapore, I managed to transition to Mandarin for conversations with fellow attendees here pretty easily. I personally felt that conversations I had here in Mandarin were a lot more colorful and interesting than English. To quote one of my Taiwanese friends: “語言真的是很有趣的連結”, which I believe can be loosely translated as “Language connects people in interesting ways”.

Packing up

Looking back at my trip, there was no doubt that the fun parts of the conference were interactions with the Taiwanese people. They are so incredibly welcoming and helpful to foreign attendees like me. I have also had fun discussing differences between our countries with the Taiwanese attendees - it’s the naunces between our spoken languages that show us how different and similar we are.