DjangoCon Keynotes Announced

WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwire - Aug 20, 2012) -  DjangoCon (www.djangocon.us), the official conference, tutorials and sprints of The Django Software Foundation (DSF), today announced the keynote presenters for DjangoCon North America.

This year's event takes place 3-7 September 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City (www.djangocon.us/venue), Washington, D.C.

The conference, themed "the Django community and ecosystem," showcases an array of tutorials, two tracks of talks over three days, lightning talks and a development sprint on topics such as creating dynamic applications, debugging live python web apps, internationalization, PostgreSQL and design tips. Keynote addresses will be presented by:

Eric Sterling, Topic: Welcome to Washington: The challenge of building "platforms" for political power and change -- Tue., Sept. 4^th, 09:15am

Keys to fighting political fatigue are belief in political power and knowledge of actual government operations. If knowledge is power, then the amount and nature of exposure of government data is crucially important. To what degree can Django empower application developers to consume this data in an intelligent and cognizable way? Moreover, can consumption mechanisms at the framework level actually influence government agencies to expose data more transparently? This is what Eric Sterling, president of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation will encourage his audience to think about.

Geoff Schmidt, Topic: Data on the Wire: An Extinction Level Event for Web Frameworks -- Wed., Sept. 5^th, 10:15am

PC software displaced mainframes; the web displaced PC software; now HTML5, JavaScript, and Cocoa threaten to drive LAMP-stack derivatives like Django to extinction. The apps of the future must be written in a radically different way. Meteor is a new web framework that automates nearly the entire process of writing a so-called "thick client" application. Geoff Schmidt, a principal developer of Meteor, will share insights from Meteor's design that could benefit Django and discuss how Meteor and Django can work together to build the real-time APIs of the future.

Selena Deckelmann, Topic: While we're here, let's fix computer science education -- Thur., Sept.6^th, 10:15am

Selena Deckelmann a major contributor to PostgreSQL, open source advocate and a fan of @feministhulk will be talking about the state of computer science (CS) education. Recent statistics predict that by 2017, 50% or more of jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines will be computer-related. But enrollment in computer science is dropping and standards for education are inconsistent and limited. Selena will tell her audience why this is relevant to all developers and what they can do to support a reform at the federal, state and local level.

"We have assembled an exciting set of keynote speakers and a diverse and interesting program for attendees of this year's DjangoCon," says Russell Keith-Magee, President of the Django Software Foundation. "Our goal is to make sure every community member can share ideas, work together, and returns with valuable knowledge to help them in their job."

To view the complete DjangoCon schedule, visit http://www.djangocon.us/schedule/.

DjangoCon/Community Sponsors include: New Relic, CMG Digital, Caktus Consulting Group, Jet Brains, Imaginary Landscape, WebCube, CACI, Lab 305, Git Hub, Mozilla, Tryolabs. For further information on sponsorships, visit http://www.djangocon.us/sponsors/.

The conference is organized by Steve Holden's The Open Bastion (http://theopenbastion.com), a Holden Web subsidiary specializing in open source themed events and conferences. This year's keynote chair is Justin Holmes of SlashRoot Tech Dojo (www.slashrootcafe.com) in New Paltz, NY. The program chair is Sean O'Connor (www.seanoc.com), partner and developer at SaaSpire (http://saaspire.com).