After a two year hiatus where I inadvertently scheduled my travel plans to overlap scipy, I will finally be able to make it to the scipy conference this year, and plan to make up for lost time by coming early to lead a tutorial on advanced mpl usage, stay through the conference, and if any of you are interested, do a sprint. There are lots of interesting things we can work on: refactoring the ticks to work nicely with the new spines, pushing forward on the documentation, optimizing stuff that is too slow or memory intensive, improving the animation API and backend support, gradients, .... Anyone interested? And if so, feel free to suggest topics or weigh in on some I listed. Also, if any of you will be there early for the tutorials, it would be great to have some help from floaters, people who walk around the room and help people who get stuck during the hands-on examples or teachers, people who lead part of the tutorial. In particular, Michael could do a segment on transforms and paths, JJ could do a segment on all his fancy arrows, boxes, annotations, etc, Andrew on his spines, Reinier on mplot3d, etc... I will probably cover all of these even if you can't attend or don't want to teach, but it is best ot hear from the experts. And if anyone not mentioned wants to contribute a segment, that would be great -- just let me know what it is. The tutorial is 2 hours and focuses on advanced mpl usage so I want to avoid the everyday stuff and focus on transforms, paths, event handling, animation, the newer features (spines, fancy*, mplot3d) and everything else I am currently forgetting. Also, we have raised a few hundred dollars in donations, so we could either fly a worthy person out who might not otherwise be able to attend, or pay for sprint registration for someone not getting institutional support. Or at least provide coffee, doughnuts, pizza and beer as fuel for participants. Fernando has also informed me there may be some travel and conference money from other sources for student developers so please email me us list if you are interested. JDH