At Pycon, there's a lot of socializing and community building going on, and those are very important. But if you really care about meeting people with specific

At Pycon, there's a lot of socializing and community building going on, and those are very important. But if you really care about meeting people with specific technical interests in order to advance on some project together, there are plenty of strategies to go about that. 1) Give a talk about the technical problem you are interested in. People who also care will attend, and later meet with you to discuss the topic (and related ones) in person. Giving a talk yourself is probably the best way to find people interested in your subject. 2) At Pycon you can book open spaces (e.g. https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/openspaces/ https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/openspaces/). There are basically a bunch of small rooms, and you can book some time slots to assign the room a certain topic, and see whether like-minded people will show up. (You could also do something non-technical like board games...) 3) After Pycon proper, there are usually a couple of days of code sprints (e.g. https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/sprints/ https://us.pycon.org/2015/community/sprints/). This gives people the chance to advance an open source project together. Some people use that as a way to meet in person with other developers, or it's possible to recruit new developers for a project.