Hello EuroPython Organisers: It is my pleasant duty to tell you that now is the time to select which city will host EuroPython in 2011. We have two excellent proposals, one from Florence, Italy and another from Cologne, Germany.
You can read the proposals here: http://www2.openend.se/~lac/EP2011/ Who should vote? My intent is to restrict the voting to people who have a past history of working EuroPythons, and whom we can reasonably expect to work both this year's Birmingham 2010 EuroPython and either of the two proposing bids. For that reason I am sending this notice to [email protected] and to the proposal submitters, Fabio Pliger and Andreas.Schreiber, asking them to circulcate this notice among those who helped write the proposal and who can otherwise be expected to work on their successful bid. I'm one of those helpers, and I don't speak English all that well. It's not clear to me that I can be of much help to the Birmingham organisers. Do you still want me to vote? Yes. And we will work harder at finding ways to make you useful this year, after all. I read the proposals and there is a large discrepancy between the proposed levels of 'sponsorship donation' which effects the price. What gives? Do not worry too much about differences in the proposed Sponsorship revenue. Experience has shown that the only way to run this thing is to build a budget with 0 Euros Sponsorhip, which is a 'bare bones EuroPython' where everything is paid for by conference fees. And then you build spreadsheets saying 'assume we get so much' - ok, we will add this, that, and some other feature (and decrease the cost to attendees by so much, if appropriate). Thus the sponsorship numbers are 'best guess' sort of figures. The Italian one is significantly higher than the German one, but then PyCON Italia has a track record of raising significant money for the Italian conference. Indeed, they have raised more for PyCON Italia than we have for EuroPython. So -- do not take the numbers too seriously, but don't take them as crazy, either. This means that people who only care about price will not know which horse to bet in this race .... but actually, this was always the case. How much one can raise in sponsorship seems directly related to 'who is hiring' and 'how's the economy doing' and little else. I don't have a working crystal ball for 2011, alas. What matters is that these are both solid proposals whose authors have seriously looked at the real charges for actually hosting a EuroPython. I wanted to include a budget so that I could reject proposals that were done by people who didn't understand enough of the realities of hosting a conference (while encouraging them to get more involved with EuroPython organisation to learn such things). Luckily, I didn't have to veto any proposals for being immature. I have more questions for the proposers. Where do I ask them? [email protected] Please do not send them directly. If you have the question, chances are somebody else does as well. I want to help with EuroPython no matter where it is held. Is that Ok? That's wonderful. Please subscribe to [email protected] . Enough, already! HOW DO I VOTE? Please send a piece of mail with your full name included to either: [email protected] or [email protected] When is the election period? The polls will close on Sunday Nov 8 at midnight CET. That's the same timezone as Florence and Cologne. Can I send you my vote directly, or post it to europython-improve? *** NO. NO. NO. *** And I won't count it if you do that. Who will read these votes? Just me. (Laura Creighton) What's to keep people from cheating? Risking my extreme displeasure. No, seriously, there are a lot of things that could go wrong about this, what will we do if that happens? We will deal with this if we come to it. There are a lot of problems with the other proposed ways to hold an election. How will you publish the results? I will make a list of who voted (so you can check that your vote went through), but not who you voted for. This means that people who worked the Italian proposal are free to vote for Germany, and vice versa, if they so chose. Nobody will find out how you voted. On Monday I will announce the totals. I'm opposed to the leaking of information prior to the closing of the polls -- so there will be none of this 'with 3 days into the poll, xxx is ahead by 3 votes, nonsense'. I think it influences the result, and in a very bad way. What happens if two people have the same full name but different email addresses? When I get two votes from different email addresses I will make an effort to determine how many people this represents. If the number turns out to be '1 idiot, voting twice' I will be quite annoyed, so please do not do that. Finally, I would like to thank all of you who have worked on both of these excellent proposals. I wish you both the best of luck, and look forward to working with you in the future. Best, Laura Creighton Election Commissioner _______________________________________________ Europython-improve mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython-improve
