At this year’s pycon, I participated in the wsgi sprint. We shared the room with some of the zope guys, and it was good to see some familiar faces. There were a lot of projects going on, and I participated in just a couple of them:
mongodb
There was a buzz in the air about mongo. I’ve heard good things about it from a number of people. I paired with Reed on getting a proof of concept working with repoze.bfg. We attempted to simulate the zodb’s transparent nested dictionary structure with it, but I mostly used it as an excuse to play around with mongo 
I’m still a little bit skeptical as to whether simulating the zodb api can work without having the abstraction leak, but I’m willing to be convinced. Anyway, there are nice python bindings to mongo that make it pretty easy to work with. The mongodb site has a list of use cases where mongodb is well suited.
frameworks
Amongst the python frameworks, there was talk about sharing a common configuration system (minus django of course). I’m all for this if it happens, because it may lead to having the frameworks share even more code underneath in the future.
There was some general application framework exploration as well. It was mostly trying to see if we could come up with good answers to common integration questions. What would ideal client code look like? How would the configuration take place? Can we mix and match behaviors easily? Can we set up a transaction system in a general way that makes it easy to integrate other components with different data stores? What types of services does it make sense for the application framework to provide?
karl
The repoze guys have created an application that is very ploney. It’s still in the works, but there’s a lot of functionality already there. In terms of it offers, it’s very similar to the current incarnation of the openplans suite. I spent some time looking through the code, and was really impressed with what I saw. The code is very clean, well factored, and easy to understand. Naturally, it’s based on repoze.bfg and a number of repoze packages. I think that it’s a great source for repoze best practices. If you want to check it out, the buildout is here (it works last time I ran it!) If people are interested, I can put it up on a demo server as well.
That pretty much sums up the different projects that I checked out. For some reason ponies, and the django pony specifically, were a central theme. Ask me offline for some more info if you’re interested
I’ll end by saying that it’s always a pleasure just to be around so many smart people at once. There was no shortage of that this year at the pycon sprints!