Hello {{ name }},

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

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

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

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

events will be.

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

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

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

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

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

speakers who are using these tools.

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

use NumPy/SciPy for their scientific and numerical computation to

solve scientific and engineering problems in their domain. The

tutorials will introduce participants to both Python as well as the

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

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

required.

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

Sprint provides you with an opportunity to contribute back to the

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you can help the community with documentation efforts, including but

not limited to writing documentation for NumPy/SciPy functions,

creating spoken tutorials.

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

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

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

are willing to contribute to the documentation efforts it is

sufficient to have a browser installed with your laptop having the

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

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

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

--

 Thanks,

 SciPy.in Organizers