So a short introduction about the European society we started in 2004 in Göteborg in Sweden we had We had my notebook is a bit slow. Sorry for that. So We started in 2004 and we formed this European society to provide a legal basically entity to run the conference and The EPS in the early days basically was just for Deciding on where to run the conference next the actual organization at that time was basically completely done by local teams Of course at that time the size of the council's conference was much smaller than it is now So we didn't have like a more than a thousand attendees like what we have nowadays these years It was more in the range of let's say 200 300 people so it could easily be managed by a small local team then afterwards as the the Conference grew we then found that it became increasingly hard to find local teams who were willing to run the conference of that size And so what we did is we basically then decided that we need a new organizational model for all this and we started with that in 2014 and Since 2015 we basically have the local team be integrated into the EPS work groups and So it's not the local team running everything alone It's the local team helping with the on-site questions that we have and the on-site task that we have for the conference So what is the purpose of the EPS? Still waiting for the slide to come There you go Well, first of all, it's running your private conferences, of course But since last year we've extended this this scope so we also wanted to help the European Python community by for example issuing grants to them helping them with organizational issues like for example finding venues or helping them by integrating them into the conference and Providing them visibility in the community. So for example, we have koala here at the conference Who we own? Vided for the for the conference to present their project here. We have flown at the conference So these are things that we are currently doing. We're also giving out smaller grants already So for example, we we sponsored PyCon DE last year We gave out coupon codes for the conference to user groups this year And we're trying to basically start this whole process. We don't have a lot of money So there's not it's not like the PSF with millions in the bank. It's just I mean, we have maybe a few 10,000 euros that we can use and we have to be very careful at the moment because the budget size that we have Compared the the available money that we have compared to the budget size of a Euro Python conference is really tiny So what else do we do? We also do some boring stuff like trademarks logos and social accounts for the Euro Python and we protect those How do we work? We have a model that's based on work groups So we set up quite a few work groups to work on different things that are needed for the conference I'm going to show you a slide with other different work groups that we have These work groups they work decentralized so mostly remotely Except for the onsite work group, of course So it makes it possible for people from all over Europe to participate in these work groups and they when if you have a skill that fits a certain work group then you can apply for that work group and if We don't have enough people in that work group. We are very glad to basically sign you up for that And then you can help in these work groups We decided to use this model because in the previous years We always had the problem that when moving from one location to the next location and changing the team from one location to the next a lot of institutional knowledge got lost and By using this work group model. It has basically we've seen that this institutional loss of Knowledge it doesn't happen anymore. We also try to take the financial risk away from the onsite teams We try to do everything take the financial risk on the EPS what we Do right now for example is we have local a local organization. We give that local organization money They then enter the contracts with the venues for tax reasons because taxes are very complicated when doing cross EU kind of contracts And then the ticketing for example is then also done by the local organization And we basically have a contract with them to manage everything so essentially Even though the the local organization will have to enter the contracts We provide the financial backup for everything and we make sure that they hold the cash flow works out. They don't have any issues So what's the structure of the EPS? Perhaps I should have not used paid for transitioning What's the structure? We have a board we have work groups. We have members Basically, anyone can become a member. The only condition is that you are you've attended a European conference And what we also regard as basically not really legally in the legal sense our members are the European attendees because that's essentially the community that we have and that the community that we work for So let's have a look at how the conference developed over the years. There you go. So we started in 2002 In Belgium in Charleau Who was at that conference? one Okay So since then we've come a long way. I mean, this is the 16th Europe Python that we're running We've done your presence every every single year. We've had many stops throughout Europe. We were in Belgium We were in in Sweden in the UK in Lithuania in Switzerland in In Italy twice now And of course in in Bilbao in best country in Spain And we were in Germany, right? and so as you can see the the Entity counts they they increased every single year Except for the last few years. We basically it seems we reached some kind of limit like 1200 seems to be kind of a Limit where we're not growing anymore and we're currently trying to figure out why that is This is it's not really bothering us much because we think that a thousand attendee conference is just fine So when we're not looking for becoming a two thousand attendee conference This is well manageable Just just have a like a thousand twelve hundred people at the conference If you want to go to a size of a picon us where you have over three thousand people Then you can no longer do it using volunteers. You have to basically organize everything professionally So here's a short timeline of how we organize Well, it's a short timeline of how we would like to organize a european conference This is not actually how it happened this year. This year was We were late with everything due to some issues that we have ahead But we still manage as you can see and I think it's we We did succeed in making everyone happy and I think it doesn't really show that we had so many problems going Well, basically reaching this point here and that's good So this is but this is how we would actually like to do the conference So the first thing that we were on want to do is we don't want to have a basically an empty time frame between the Conference of the previous year and the next and the selection process of the For the next year. So we want to kick up the selection process very very early after the conference We want to finalize it very early and then of course we want to start launching the Preview site sign up sign the venue contract Venue contract was the main issue that we had last this year. So we're going to try to do that way Earlier than then this year So if we're lucky we can get it signed in October and then we have a good basis for everything else that we need to do Then we can prepare the sponsor brochure. We can ask sponsors to sign up for it We can then in parallel work on the website finish that set ticket prices and so on so that we are ready for basically launching the website in January and Then starting the ticket sales Do the call call for proposals Start the regular ticket sales The EB ticket sales this year. They were over in a day. So we sold 200 tickets in a single day which was amazing and I think we're going to keep that mode. So we just set in a certain fixed number of tickets to sell What we need to do in order to improve things is we need to get out the schedule earlier So we need to go to the whole CFP process the session List selection process talk voting and so on we need to do that a lot earlier so that we can get the word out And then we hope to basically increase the ticket sales as well because ticket sales usually They usually pick up at the very end so during the organization of the conference When you look at ticket sales you often find that well, we've not we've not sold enough tickets So it everything looks very risky what we're doing, but in the end it usually works out. So there's We are pretty confident that we will get at least a thousand attendees every year And of course you have to do some extra work like we have marketing and design work group Which does the conference booklet? It also does the conference the sponsor booklet We have lots of design work to do like what you see around here the venue the signage it was all done by the Marketing and design work group. We have a designer in Spain that we're using for this For the for the t-shirts. We have an artist from Spain as well So over the time we've figured out certain Companies to work with so we don't have to select them Again each year like for example the printer for the brochure or the printer for the t-shirts This is all basically set. So there's nothing to worry about there which makes things easier then at a certain point you need to go to the To the venue and then discuss things like catering because catering you have to tell the caterer Well, if you you have to give them some numbers a few months before the The conference and then a few weeks before the conference You have to basically set the minimum numbers and the way it works is that you tell them, okay I'm gonna have like 750 people attend on that day The number of people who attend the day is not equal to the number of actual tickled sales that you have so what the estimate that we usually use is First of all, we say okay on Monday Tuesday and Wednesday. We're gonna have more people on Thursday and Friday We're gonna have fewer people sprints. We have even less and the general Basically maximum number that we use for for these catering numbers is 80% For the for the most active days And then of course you need to print everything For example at this venue. We had a we have this parcel company that we have to work with So we have to send everything to that parcel company. The parcel company tells us you cannot send things In too early So you have to wait until about two weeks before the conference where you can actually ship stuff to the conference That makes things very hard because you have to time things very carefully for example the printing of all the marketing stuff And it sometimes works out sometimes doesn't work out so you get things shipped too late And that's an issue. I did something that we I mean with the existing printers that we have we now know how things work out And we know how to time these things and they usually then do work out Okay, so how does your Python work group work? So each work group has one or two chairs. You can have co-chairs For example the program work group had co-chairs two co-chairs But one chair basically then because Of course you you're working with volunteers, right? So it's not like in a company you can say okay, you have this job You're gonna do this for the whole organizational phase You do have to take into account that there's a real life to all this and People ever have day jobs and of course if they change jobs or have different I mean basically changes in the personal situation then of course you they may have to step down and doesn't So you have to accommodate for that. So you usually have to basically the work groups need to be organized dynamically The chair is responsible for everything that the work group has to do So if something doesn't work out the chairs to step in of course the chairs also has to match the members and then assign subtasks to the various members in that group to make everything happen and Then we have voting and on voting members. This is more like It's in like an organizational thing that we have to do in the EPS So some members are allowed to vote when we do vote which doesn't happen La some members are not allowed to vote. They have to be made voting members by the EPS board every now and then And then of course what we've seen in the last just we always get inactive members Some people basically in they don't tell us but they just don't do anything anymore So every now and then we go and then we identify the inactive members and then remove them from the work groups So that doesn't look like we have lots and lots of people in those work groups So we get more volunteers who then basically come to us and Ask whether they can help which is good So these are the work groups that we have one is for conference or administration This is for like signing contracts evaluating everything One is for finance so the finance work group does the budget and controls it. We have one work group For sponsors, which is the one that basically does all the sponsor contacts. There's usually a lot of email going on We have a communications work group for all the like the social websites that we have the social channels that we have the communication on the Mobile app that we have Everything that you get from basically from from Europyson is organized by this communications work group the support work group is for Organizing all the support which includes everything that happens at the conference desk It includes organizing the help desk that we have the online help desk So everything that has to do with supporting attendees or supporting speakers or supporting Sponsors this always goes to the support work group and then in some cases for example for sponsors What we do is we tell the support work group to basically then forward everything to the sponsors work group because they have more more knowledge about these things and it's similar for other work groups like for example speakers The support work group knows who to contact. That's the important bit So there are some things that they can do themselves But in some situations it's better to just move on And they put the request to some other work group. Then we have a financial aid work group, which obviously does financial aid And we have a few more Okay, we have marketing design marketing and design is responsible for all the the booklets that we print all the roll-ups that you can see around here also responsible for designing logos for Choosing the colors for example for the website so what we do there for example is we usually work together with a designer and then Tell the designer roughly what kind of style we want what what kind of theme we want We give them information about the location that we have and then they come back to us with proposals And then we work with them to with a designer to make Basically decide on one design and then we improve that and then the designer comes back to us with a complete corporate identity sheet Which includes everything that you normally need for these things So yeah, not only get a logo in various different formats and sizes You also get a color sheet so that you exactly know which colors to use and then we use those colors on the website For example, so this is all done by the marketing and design work group. So there are two things One is designing everything and the other thing is printing everything Then we have the program work group, which is responsible for everything that has to do with the schedule so they essentially take care of creating the schedule finding the the Speakers selecting talks based on the talk voting running the talk voting And quite a other quite a few other things Alexander can probably Talk for an hour about the things that we have to do There's lots of work going on there Then we have the work as a web work group, which is responsible for the website. So basically programming the website updating the website And basically make in in case it it goes wrong or something goes wrong with then to fix it And we using we have our own server for this where we use a Docker containers to run everything and all this is managed by the web work group Then we have the onsite team Which is meant to be the work group for the people helping locally. So those should be people ideally With some people living in the location where we actually run the conference, but it's also okay if they are just Not too far away. Let's say Because what's what we expect from the onsite team is that they actually can go to the To the venue and then sort out certain things problems that we have Ask certain things figure out things like I don't know whether some power sockets are available for example All the the small little details that take up a lot of time So these things are need to be done by an onsite team plus, of course, we also have the issue that we need to We need to ship things to the location and after we're after the conference We need to store things for the next year So for example on Friday tomorrow, we need to tear tear down Quite a bit of the conference setting that we have here because we're just going to do the sprints in the in the other part of the venue And for that we need to basically then put everything back into boxes put everything into we got a storage box here in Rimini, we're going to get a van and then move everything over. So these are things that the onsite team can help with and This is where local teams can then really Show their support then we have a media team or let's say we should have a media team right now. We don't have any Because essentially the volunteers we had there were not available to provide much help So what what the media team was supposed to do is they were supposed to do the take care of the video recording that we have The basically preparing all the videos for uploads to YouTube managing the whole process working with a video recording company the The people you see here recording everything we hired them to do this And I think they're doing a very good job and with the live streaming I think that works really well And so basically everything it has to do with media is should be handled by that by that team So if you're an expert in these things then please do contact us because we need help Right the next one the the last work group that we have is the code of conduct work group This is a very this is a special work group because code of conducts always something that you way you have to Well, you have to have lots of experience with it you It needs to be a small team because you in general you need to discuss issues that happen with more than just a few people But not too many so you don't get too many opinions so you can easily and quickly reach a decision and Basically what that work group does is it? It works out the code of conduct updates it regularly, so we've done a few updates for this and It also takes care of handling the issues and then also reporting the issues and in the closing session So fortunately up until now, I'm saying up until now because tonight is a social event up until now we've not had any Significant code of conduct issues, which is really nice We only had a few communication things that were going wrong with some sponsors So so far it's working out. Well, we don't have a lot to do in that work group Okay, so how do we work together? we used to use just mailing lists and Because mailing lists, I mean at some point you get so many emails that you simply just don't care anymore and you don't read them So it doesn't really help in communicating So what we thought would be a good idea to is to have some kind of messenger and because telegram was new I think we saw it last year with that was new we we chose telegram Instead of slack for example because slack wouldn't give us a non-profit account So there you go slack We use telegram now and it has been a really good Really good success. So the interaction between the work group members has increased a lot we can do things a lot faster and We also last year started to have a telegram group for attendees and this has been working out really well We started that as experiment because we weren't sure whether Well, you know, I mean if you have like 300 400 people on on a telegram group or just any social account 460 we have now. Yeah, then of course You can get some bad actors and it can go wrong So we just I mean every now and then we just keep an eye on it So we make sure that everything works out, but so far we've not had any major issues and It's been working out really well, and I think the attendees like it too. So you can see that bit because I mean they're using it a lot We also have a wiki for the internal Things that we need to organize. We have Google Docs quite a few of those spreadsheets for managing things Documentation for things that are basically unstructured We used to have guidelines We've not really kept them up to date unfortunately So we what we always try to do is we try to put all the knowledge that we have into some form of document Because as we find it's very important if someone breaks away, then the knowledge breaks away to and we try to make it possible for others to pick up and then Continue the work So that's all I have to say. Are there any questions? Yes one We don't have a session here. So maybe So which work groups need help at the moment you mentioned the media team and the other groups are all filled or sorry Which work groups need help at the moment? Which of the work groups need help you mentioned the media team meets. Yes. Yes. Just a second We need help in Just let me go to that slide again It's very slow. Anyway, I can tell you We need help with the well, of course the onsite team always needs help But but that kind of depends on where we run the conference, of course We need help in the media a work group. We need help in the communications work group I think the program work group is mostly fine. We do need a lot of help in the sponsors work group And the sponsors work group was basically myself in Soviet this year Which is I mean there's so much communication going on is just simply not enough We need help in Let's see the administration work group So basically going through all the contract work and making sure everything is all right and Signing up the administration work group also takes care of signing up new volunteers Which is it's not a very complex process, but it has to be done and takes time What else do we have The finance work group would be would be good to have a few people more there Especially once with that have some idea of how budgeting works And of course we need people from the from the local organization in that work group as well because they usually then have to do bank transfers for example Or the when they do ticketing we do we use their PayPal account for the doing ticketing and their stripe account of the ticketing and Where else let's see The support work group can use more help Maria has been working a lot in the support work group Maybe you can and Jill of course. Yes. Jill is the chair of the support work group They can always use more help I mean usually what in this in the support work group what you do That most of the work happens on the help desk before the conference and then at the conference It just goes crazy because you have so many attendees asking you questions. You don't know what to do anymore And so on having more people on site to actually help with the support work group is very important Okay, let's see what else financial financial aid was done by two people by Daria and Christian this year And Larry also helped later on she came she joined the team She's not here. I think ah Daria is there So yeah, they they can probably use maybe a few more people Probably not too Many because they're that was me Because it's something that well you have to decide quickly, right? marketing design yes, we could use more people there especially people with with like Well, let's say a good taste. I don't know You know people who know if something looks good and then say okay, this looks good right that type of people Because the actual design work is done by designers. So we we're not really looking for designers But maybe people who have Yeah, like I said good taste So yeah web developer work group. We could use more people there Unfortunately, the website is a bit of a mess to be honest. I mean the source code is just yeah Well it grew organically as per that way and it's not well documented We had to figure out many things ourselves by basically just doing grep and then trying to figure out where everything happens in the source code But we've managed to actually get it working and we we now have a few people who actually know how things work And I think Stefan has spent a lot of time recently working on that. So Stefan is down here and Patrick of course. Yeah, they are and Patrick has been working a lot on the CSS and the front-end side and also on the back-end side He did the porting to Django 1.8 this year Sorry last year. He did that and then for this year And so fun is working on refactoring So it does need a bit of refactoring because it has a lot of code that we really I mean don't really use anymore So to me that can just go away. That's like from the program work site I think we must integrate certain stuff we use better together because it's confusing and taking a lot of time Actually, like for example to manage when the speaker is actually present or not We have a config file and stuff and we should put that in in our system So essentially what you need for the web work group is you need Django skills. You need to be Not afraid of entering a code base, which is huge and not documented and And has Several packages which should be one package But are in fact three packages then it's layered in three layers and then where we actually only need one layer and so yeah, I mean it's a mess, let's be honest and If you're not afraid of that you can really help Thank you. I have a question regarding Maybe you can outline some challenges regarding working with volunteers because as I can imagine working with volunteers is kind of unpredictable stuff So I I'm pretty sure that right after the conference like a lot of people try to sign up and say hey I think I want to help you but then eventually with time people will start fading away and This is a very challenging Task for I guess for the head of the team to get things done and it's probably much more challenging than getting things done in a Commercial organization where there are employees and they can commit to something How you how you deal with that? especially Can maybe you have some like secrets or something to share? No, we use water as everyone else, but It's just yeah, it's a problem. It definitely is What we found is that it's especially hard when when volunteers who do actually work Suddenly break away in the middle of the organization and this year This has happened to us a couple of times and it was really hard for for then essentially the chairs to basically fill in So we had to do a lot of work this year much more than it's really sustainable by any volunteer So we had for example, we had people working three to four hundred hours on the conference Which is not something that you can ask from a volunteer. It's just way too much Essentially what you have to do is you have to just Or what we found is put it that way you have to tell volunteers what to do What we use in in the last few years was an approach where we tried to basically Well, we thought that people would work in the same way as we do as basically the main organizers so when when we see a problem we we just take it and we fix it right but Normal, let's say volunteer does not go into a work group He or she does not know and then just pick a problem and work on it and so And we were expecting that it didn't happen So we had a quite a few volunteers sign up, but they were not really working or actively participating and What we found helped is actually Telling people what to do and it's it may seem strange But because it's like a top-down approach that you do like if you do that It works really well and people like it people like to be told what to do And then they've they've done everything and then they come back to you and they want to get a new task And if you do that a couple of times then they eventually start working on things themselves because they feel more confident and then they Know things how things work and so that approach seems to be helpful. Yeah What time does the general assembly start? Alex Okay


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