lördagen den 8 februari 2014 12.32.41 skrev Hynek Schlawack: > > Let's all be nicer to each other, hm? We're on the same team.
Hynek got it absolutely right. EuroPython is a community conference. It is run by volunteers for the community. When they make mistakes, we need to help them on the right track by offering constructive critcism. The mistake with the Early Bird tickets was that there was a limited number of tickets in each category, rather than a limited number of Early Bird Tickets for the entire pool. I'm sure the organizers will fix this. It doesn't make sense that you can still be a Corporate Early Bird, but not a Personal Early Bird. Budgeting the conference is really hard. The larger it becomes, the harder the job. Having a tight budget also makes thngs much more difficult, and Berlin has a tight budget. If the conference gets fully booked, there will be a profit of about 5% of the budget. If it reaches the number of people that came to Florence, there is no profit at all. The profit, by the way, is split between the EPS and the local Python organozation and goes back to the community in the form of seed capital for future conferences. When you sell Early Bird tickets, you usually price them so they cover the incremental costs for an attendee. These people contribute nothing, or very little, to the fixed costs and if every attendee had an early Bird ticket, the conference would run at a huge loss. The reason you sell Early Bird tickets are several. You get money so you can pay for intitial costs, like down payments on the venue. You allow some people who otherwise could not afford to go attend. You get some buzz in the community, which increases the interest for the conference. When I ran the conference in Göteborg, we had fixed costs of about €1000. EVerything else was per-attendee. We also knew that we would have plenty of space to spare. This allowed us the luxury of having an open Early Bird registration. We knew (well, were almost certain) that there would be at least 50 people who would pay the full ticket price. In Berlin, the cost of the venue is in the tens of thousands of Euro, and there is a high fixed cost for Audio and Video equipment. There is also a hard cap on how many people you cań fit, and it is quite likely that tis cap will be hit. With an open Early Bird period, there is a significant risk that the conference will be a huge success, being fully booked, but that it would kill EuroPython, due to incurring a significant loss. So, in summary, everything isn't exactly as we want it to be, but much of this comes from external constraints and the fact that we have a new venue and a new team running the conference. They are bound to make the occasional screwup due to inexperience. They need your understanding and support. Jacob Hallén _______________________________________________ EuroPython 2014 Berlin, 21th27th July EuroPython mailing list EuroPython@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython
