Hello everyone, I have been touring around Europe with my work, so I am just now catching up with the discussions. So below are some scattered thoughts from me on what I have read thus far.
2009/3/15 Jacob Hallén <[email protected]>: > - How many people can we have before we run into the limits of the facilities? I think this would be a nice problem to have. Like John, I don't think we will. However, if we get a lot more than we expect then at some point we just declare it closed. Declaring the conference full is not a bad thing, those that do not get in this year will be chomping at the bit to get in next year. However, there is always a certain amount of cancellations, so anyone who could not get a ticket can be put on a waiting list to be reassigned a ticket when one becomes available. Due to some costs being variable, others being fixed, and yet others being semi-fixed until a certain step point; there are a few "sweet spots" where we might want to close booking. Adding a thousand in costs to allow one more delegate would not be sensible. Adding it to allow 50 delegates might make sense. The venue itself would handle a large number. Our experience is that at any point, a significant amount of people will be at no talk at all, they will be programming in the foyer and bar areas, in the toilet or out shopping. If one talk is full, then nevermind, people can go to other talks and get the talk next year, or listen to the audio later. The things that become more difficult as numbers increase are food, social events, general crowd control and dealing with people's random problems, more people means more random one of things. Being prepared on the small things helps with that. At the last PyConUK we had a secure staff room, having a place to print things and talk privately this made organisation far easier. The tutorial days were also a huge help, as a subsection of the crowd know what to do by the time the rest of the hordes arrive. The people who have come to the venue before (presumably those who booked at the extra early-bird rate) will also have a calming effect as they know the drill already. > söndagen den 15 mars 2009 skrev John Pinner: >> I closed Extra Early Bird this morning, at this point we had 142 >> delegates registered. It is clear that several of the UK people knew this was coming, they were expecting it because the two PyConUK events had the same system of firm deadlines, we have credibility with them. Hopefully by the second year here, the other Europeans will be in the same rhythm. I have some thoughts on what we could do now since I do not think we get enough delegates by doing nothing. Expecting the same publicity to hit everyone in Europe in the same way is not realistic, we need to divide and conquer, focus on some of the things which would bring us the most delegates: * There is no Republic of Ireland in the list yet. We need to contact Python Ireland, they have good mailing lists and getting from the Republic of Ireland to Birmingham is very cheap, so we should be able to get several Irish delegates. PyConUK had several, Europython should have even more. * Likewise we need to find out what lists exist for the Netherlands. It is very near and we should particularly focus on them. * From Germany we have had 20 delegates, but I think we should do more. A prepared German email should be written. We can then distributed that email to all those Germans who have currently booked, and ask them nicely to send it around their friends and colleagues. There are direct and short flights from various German cities to Birmingham International. There are many German Python Programmers and Germany does not have its own conference yet. * Python Italy have a list of everyone who has gone to their conference, this is gold dust, as these people have already been willing to go to a Python conference. We should ask for the list, or for them to send something to it. I would even consider a (small) special offer for those who have been to PyCon Italy before, anything which gets us noticed on the PyCon Italy list. * PyCon France is 30-31 May, which kind of steals our thunder a little there, it will be difficult to get mindshare with another conference first. So to make up for it, ideally we would have someone there in PyCon France at a stall with a laptop to guide people to make bookings on the spot, perhaps with a special show offer (e.g. £10 off the standard rate). Unfortunately, people like me in the UK are the least well placed to do much of this. But we should try to contact people to help us in these specific ways. Best Wishes, Zeth _______________________________________________ Europython-improve mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve
