1 Hello {{ name }},

     2   The first edition of the Indian version of SciPy conference, dubbed

     3 SciPy.in 2009 is just 5 days away. Many of you have shown interests

     4 in attending all three events:  conference, tutorials and sprint. But

     5 some of you have been asking for a summary of what these individual

     6 events will be.

     7 

     8    To make things clear, here is a short description of the three

     9 individual events. The main SciPy.in 2009 Conference will contain

    10 a number of presentations by both noted NumPy/SciPy developers and

    11 speakers like Dr.Travis Oliphant, Christopher Burns, Dr. David

    12 Cournapeau, Jarrod Millman, Dr.Prabhu Ramachandran as well as other

    13 speakers who are using these tools.

    14 

    15    The two days of tutorials are aimed at people who want to learn to

    16 use NumPy/SciPy for their scientific and numerical computation to

    17 solve scientific and engineering problems in their domain. The

    18 tutorials will introduce participants to both Python as well as the

    19 scientific tool stack built on top of it. The tutorials require basic

    20 computer use experience. Bringing your own laptop is helpful, but not

    21 required.

    22 

    23    Finally, the most exciting part of SciPy.in 2009 are sprints.

    24 Sprint provides you with an opportunity to contribute back to the

    25 Python scientific computing community. As we know NumPy/SciPy are

    26 open source tools and almost all open source softwares are driven by

    27 the community. So for these tools to succeed we want help from the

    28 community, i.e all of you people. This is an event where all of you

    29 sit together along with the developers, hack on one of these tools.

    30 If you are one of those guys who is interested in programming you can

    31 contribute by writing code, fixing bugs and sending those patches. If

    32 you are not interested in programming but more interested in writing,

    33 you can help the community with documentation efforts, including but

    34 not limited to writing documentation for NumPy/SciPy functions,

    35 creating spoken tutorials.

    36 

    37    For the sprints it is required for you to bring your own laptops.

    38 Your laptop should have a working build system, with NumPy and SciPy

    39 built from source if you want to contribute by writing code. If you

    40 are willing to contribute to the documentation efforts it is

    41 sufficient to have a browser installed with your laptop having the

    42 capability of connecting to internet. If you want to create spoken

    43 tutorials be sure that you have a mic for recording and any software

    44 that can capture your desktop, for example, "istanbul" on GNU/Linux.

    45 

    46 --

    47  Thanks,

    48  SciPy.in Organizers