On Tuesday 27 October 2009 01:40:43 John Pinner wrote: > > I'm sorry I've been quiet lately: we are under a lot of pressure at > work, the good news is that we just heard that we got the contract for > the Archive Data Management system at Silverstone (the car race track > that is).
Congratulations! I don't want to reduce your nicely written message too much, but I'd like to add a few points. [Sponsorship] > In future I do not think that we should rely on getting sponsorship, > nor should we spend valuable time chasing it, a simple announcement > and basic brochure is quite enough. I think this probably needs doing in a more timely fashion than it has been. The sponsorship brochure has been very good in recent years, and if this is the kind of thing sponsors like to see, then we should just get it to them sooner. > We should not rely on sponsorship when budgetting, although if > sponsors do come forward that would be good. For example we could > budget for very basic food and increase the food budget nearer the > event if sponsors come forward. Agreed. > Sponsorship must be paid before the conference (say two weeks before). > We do not have time to chase payment afterwards. I think this goes for all payment, as far as possible. And I think we should be very skeptical about offers of things rather than cash from sponsors who aren't going to represent themselves at the event. [Numbers of Delegates] > In 2009 we had around 440 delegates (I think 446 was the final > number), which was more than we expected. The absolute maximum we can > handle in Birmingham (in facilities we can afford to hire) is 550. If > we go for more we would need to hire a much more expensive venue. In > our case this would be the International Conference Centre, but the > costs would mean that the delegate fees would be a lot higher than > many people could afford for a community conference. I was a bit worried about the number at the Conservatoire, really. It felt like the place was falling to pieces, and I wondered at one point whether it would be necessary to leave the venue to find a working toilet. > When they moved from Washington DC, PyCon US solved their venue > problem by using hotel conference centres, which meant that they had > to guarantee hotel rooms. As long as the conference expanded this was > OK, but this year the consequences were that PyCon lost, I think, > around $200000, and are liable for $300000 guarantees for 2010. Wow! I thought it was only EuroPython that lost money. ;-) > * We cannot afford to risk this. > * We must not guarantee hotel rooms. > * We should not be afraid to limit the number of delegates to that > which the venue can handle. Agreed on all counts. I note that the Django conferences have limited their numbers to great success. > Whilst the number of delegates that we might expect at future > EuroPythons may be 800-900, this number is beyond what (I think) can > be handled in a community conference: it is too much work for > volunteers to handle comfortably and rather than go for paid > organisers we should limit numbers and maintain a 'community > atmosphere'. An upper limit of 500-600 may be sensible. Given that > Europe seems to have more 'regional' conferences than the US already, > this may be OK. I think so too. Big conferences are impersonal and inefficient, and EuroPython shouldn't be aiming to be like some big academic/industry conference, either. (I notice that PyCon will be having poster areas, too. I'd argue that you'd only ever do this if you either wanted to waste large areas of the venue's floorspace or could afford to do so, but that's cynicism for you.) [Experience - agreed!] [Help] > It was quite noticeable that it was the same people doing most of the > work for the past several EuroPythons, and not always the locals > either. Several of the UK contingent did help with EP 2008, but this > was unusual. There was no new blood from outside the UK helping with > EP2009. I continue to advocate a "global" working group for non-local stuff like the Web site, non-local publicity, registration, scheduling, and all that. This stuff should be continuously maintained and ready to use actively. Any "let's design a conference solution" proposals should be ignored until such a time when those proposing them actually have something which can actually take over more or less seamlessly. [Sprints] > At EP 2009 we did not have sufficient advance notice of what sprints > would be held, nor the numbers of participants. The sprints have a > considerable impact on the budget, as the sprinters do not pay for > them (nor should they), and the costs have to come out of the main > conference budget. > > Based on the 2009 experience, for EP 2010 we will not be providing > dedicated sprint facilities before the conference, but will do > afterwards. Maybe we need better publicity for this. I admit to not pursuing publicity matters this time, but I wasn't too impressed by the way things were done. [Number of Talks] > We accepted too many talks for EP 2009, at least for the facilities we > booked. As we accepted more talks we booked more rooms, but these were > not big enough, and we had too many streams. > > For 2010 we plan to have an extra day for the conference talks, that > is four days instead of three, which means we can have fewer streams > and bigger rooms. I think you'll always get people arguing for more of one thing and less of another. Certainly, you don't want six tracks or six days, though. Again, I'll repeat what I've written above about retaining as much infrastructure and expertise as possible on a "global" basis. My feeling about EP2009 was that there were many willing volunteers - which is always good - some of whom could have spent more time working with the resources we already had. Although it's great to see people learn (and succeed), it's exasperating to see things redone that could have been kept from before. It's like having the next guy in a relay race start from the same place as you do, and you have to wait for *him* to catch *you* up before he takes the baton for the next leg of the race. All this makes for much wasted time which could have been used more wisely. I also think that overenthusiasm to start some things afresh discourages previous volunteers whose work ends up being undone/redone as a result. As I once said to much disdain a few years ago, the Olympic Games don't just take shape on a continual one-off basis: they're backed by a continuous organisational activity. Some of EuroPython's activities could operate similarly. Paul _______________________________________________ Europython-improve mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve
