Good Evening Everybody, (Just in time for the IRC meeting, I hope.)
Here are my thoughts on improving the EuroPython website and admin systems. These thoughts are a result of work on the PyConUK site last year. Some of these points have been put forward in Laura's list for EP. The most important things are: * It must be easy for the organisers to maintain * It must be easy for the delegates to find out what's going on, for example to see what talks there are going to be before they book. * It must be *very* easy for the delegates to register and pay, otherwise we won't get many delegates. * We don't want to get bogged down with techies re-inventing the wheel every year: we want a system which will last and be capable of expansion. * We want something simple to use and simple to look after. The point about it being easy to register and pay is very important to me, as I have been put off booking a place at conferences in the past. It's something we tried to address for PyConUK and did so with some success. What I suggest is that we break the task down into three areas: 1. A basic website, easy for the organisers to maintain, and for the delegates to see what is going on. 2. A Registration system to take the bookings and payments, and produce reports for example: number of bookings, tutorial bookings, meal requirements, tee shirt sizes, badges. 3. A Talks submissions, review and scheduling system. When we looked into this for PyConUK we looked at the PyCon US system, because we wanted to avoid re-inventing the wheel, but came to the conclusion that with PyCon US being so much bigger, with greater requirements and greater resources, it was too complicated for us. I suspect the gap will continue to widen as PyCon US grows further up to 1000+ delegates. But we liked the look of the PyCon US Talks submissions and scheduling system and tried using this. It was successful, although it needed a lot of work to remove the US-specific stuff hard-coded in, and other things, all the more difficult because none of us knew Django. However with Doug's help and encouragement (thanks) we were pleased with the result. This is my proposal for EuroPython: 1. Basic Website ========= The host organisation should be able to use anything they wish for this, thus put their own stamp on the site. However, we should have a core system available for this, and a wiki as suggested by Paul Boddie would be ideal: it gives the organisers lots of flexibility and the delegates a personal involvement. Paul has shown that a wiki can be skinned successfully, and his demo site for EP2008 is available for us to look at: http://europython.pyconuk.org I think it looks just the job: let's use it! (BTW, despite the url, I had nothing to do with it: we've just hosted it publicly.) 2. Registration Bookings and Payments ====================== I'd like to propose that the UK group develop this, helped by anyone who wishes to be involved. We'd use the experience we gained on PyConUK to start with, basing it on a commercial shopping cart which has the advantage of already having interfaces to the major payment gateways. In fact we have started on this already, we'll be using it for another conference in April, and PyConUK in September. We had a meeting of our group last Saturday, and have an initial design worked out. You can see some notes on this at: http://www.pywm.eu/Projects/Conference_System/ and see some pictures of the crew at: http://www.pywm.eu/Gallery/January2008/ (except for me because I took the pictures, which is why they are not very good ;) 3. Talks Submissions and Scheduling ===================== I still like the idea of working with PyCon US on this: a subset of their system is much more manageable than the whole thing. If it got to be a problem, then we could always fork that bit. So I propose that we continue with the PyCon Talks system, maybe forking it. For this we would need some Django developers. If nobody else comes forward, our UK group could take this on as well, but we'd rather that some else did it: we'd be happy to work with them. Whatever happens, we'll be using it for a conference we have on in March/April: http://spring2008/ukuug.org which is not a Python conference, although there is some Python content. Those are my suggestions for the site. Now for hosting the conference itself. EuroPython 2009/2010 ============= The PyCon UK Society would like to host EP 2009/2010. In preparation for this, we would like to help with the organisation of EP2008 by: * Providing web hosting * Developing the conference Registration/Payments/Reporting system. * Helping with the Talks Submission/Scheduling system if required. Best wishes, John --
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