[ Moving to europython-improve@ ] On Mon, 2012-01-16 at 21:45 +0100, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: > Hi Fabio, > > i...@pycon.it wrote: > > Europython has become a primary python community event thus some > > considerations and decisions should be made. We'd like to share our thoughts > > openly and receive your feedback. > > > > ... > > > > With those premises we decided to take a public position towards the future > > of > > the Conference. **We would like to publicaly expose our openness to organize > > and run 2013/2014 edition**. > > Yeah :-) Thank you very much for making that offer ! > > > At the moment I didn't hear about any real and > > concrete proposal that is convincing enough about the fact that we won't > > have > > any slowdown in our conference growth, credibility and quality as well as > > not > > compromising the work that has been done by many people over the past 10 > > years. > > I haven't heard of any proposal either - I guess the size of the > conference is starting to frighten people who would otherwise not > have a problem with organizing it.
My own humble opinion is that it will get harder and harder to move EuroPython around Europe as time goes by. A conference of this size can't be improvised, and I'm truly skeptical that at this point someone from another country can learn how to do it just by joining a few activities online. > > ... > > > > _Note:_ I'm not including tickets revenue in this consideration as we > > decided > > that we wanted a conference affordable to everybody keeping the prices as > > low > > as we could. Thus tickets average revenue was almost 0. > > I think there's still some room to ramp up the tickets prices in > order to make the budget look healthier. EuroPython is the second > most important Python conference we have, right after PyCon US, > so you can safely use their (low) prices are guideline: > > https://us.pycon.org/2012/registration/ > > Capping the number of attendees as you've done in 2011 and starting > registration early is also a good way to make you feel more secure about > the numbers. Ticket price is always a hard call :) Since we've sold out in 2011, and most people seem to be very satisfied with the event, I think that it would sound reasonable to increase prices, since we might expect more people willing to come, and at the same time we can't really host 1000 people in the venue anyway (as much as we would like to). On the other hand, I like the idea of keeping the price low and affordable for everybody, but maybe we should probably work more on grants to help that side of the problem. I actually like the PyCon US model of "everybody pays and everybody can ask for a grant", but I'm split about it. > I also wonder how we could help in getting the number of sponsors > bumped up to higher levels. One thing that really strikes us as very odd is that there is a large difference in the amount of money that companies seem willing to invest, compared to PyCon US. This is especially glaring when it happens to be the *same* companies investing something like five times more in PyCon US compared to EuroPython. I think that part of this can be justified with the USA being sort of the core of technology in these days, so it might be that the total amount of business being done in USA is so larger than Europe that it reflects also in our sponsorships; moreover, for recruiting, it might be easier for company to recruit among developers living in a single country (USA) rather than living across several different countries (Europe). So I think the first thing that would help is that the PSF could push EuroPython sponsorships packs to PyCon USA sponsors. We might be still in time for this, but I think it would work better if EuroPython sponsorships were proposed together with PyCon US sponsorship; like "buy this pack and with X% extra you can be present in Europe as well". Food for thought for next year. > A lot of companies are looking for Python > developers, so recruiting is certainly one of the key arguments for > sponsors to invest in EuroPython. Recruiting works very well; our sponsorship packs are divided by sponsorship goals instead of being raising levels, and the recruiting packs are surely very popular. We did a recruiting session, and we got very positive feedback from the companies that joined it (both immediately at the event and afterwards), but maybe there's something more we can do for facilitate recruiting? > Another is product announcements > and presentation. Perhaps you could make those two aspects (even) more > interesting for sponsors in order to attract more sponsors. > Another argument I often hear from smaller companies is that > manning a booth at the conference is too costly for them > (not because of the booth signup fee, but because of the > staffing costs). Perhaps having a poster session or some > flat panel LCDs in the conference halls for unmanned > presentation would help make sponsoring more interesting to > those companies ?! Yes, that's an idea. For companies that can't join the conference we usually suggest to prepare a brochure for the conference bag, but maybe the poster session is something we should attempt (for both sponsors and regular partecipants). Thanks for the proposals! -- Giovanni Bajo :: ra...@develer.com Develer S.r.l. :: http://www.develer.com My Blog: http://giovanni.bajo.it
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