Kiran

After attending YAPC::NA at asheville I got an email for the YAPC feedback survey. I filled it yesterday and later thought of something that could be tried but am not sure if it's a good idea so here is a brain dump :-).

The idea is to combine social as well as technology aspect together to make it fun for the participants as well as being a learning experience since you actually get to try out something .
Lets say there are 200 attendees.
Reserve a 50 minute (or less) slot for this in the main hall

- Specify a task (or many tasks like an exercise in Modern Perl, Moose , Plack, Event Driven, MVC framework ... )

-100 people are designated places and they have the pre-requisites (modules ? ) installed on their laptops

- The other 100 people join the people and pair program or one works while the other watches , discuss for 10 minutes or argue over why their ide is better

- After 10 minutes the participants are moved either left/right and start with a new partner while the ones with the laptop do not move

So in theory after the designated 50 minutes , each person has worked with 5 people, I believe this has a lot to offer as you actually get to program/discuss and you can pick up a lot of useful stuff like how people use their IDE their configuration , their style of programming and it is also fun you get to meet different people. Imagine a newbie getting a chance to pair program with some well known perl hackers.


I think if some more thought is put in to this and planned it could work and be a fun exercise. What do you think ?