PyCon US 2014/2015 and Passover
pycon.blogspot.co.il
pycon.blogspot.co.il
In the interest of heading off some of the less productive discussion, here are some salient facts:
* Nobody involved is an antisemite
* Nobody involved is malicious
* The date oops was an honest mistake
* The fact that the incident wasn't owned and dealt with is the bigger mistake
* The fact that it's being dealt with now is a _good_ thing. I'm grateful that it's happening.
* I don't have any personal beef with the organizers, and neither should you
Mainly I'm sad to be excluded from pycon until 2016.
For instance, if a significant number of US PyCon attendees were ardent chess players, then avoiding scheduling PyCon to overlap with the US Open chess tournament would not be pandering to chess. It would simply be recognizing that PyCon attendees have lives outside of PyCon, and when a particular date is bad for many of them, it makes sense to try to avoid scheduling PyCon on that date.
Furthermore, if it were a conflict with chess, I doubt you would have posted that there are chess tournaments every weekend and since PyCon can't avoid them all, it should not try to avoid any of them. You would recognize the utter idiocy of not distinguishing between major national tournaments that people make significant long-term attendance plans for (such as the US Open), and, say, weekly quads at the local chess club.
Seriously, it's a bummer that this apology took so long, but it says a lot about the community that Jesse and the Board are willing to own this and have made explicit their intentions to do better in the future.
None of us are perfect. The important thing is to own our mistakes and endeavor to do better in the future. And that's what this statement means to me.