Here are my 0.02$ or rather 0.02 EUR to the recent heated discussion.
Sorry for walls of text.
Early bird sell out and frustrated voices
=========================================
It's usually better idea to provide more than one price level connected
with early booking a ticket. For example:
300 EUR - 100 tickets or short date period
320 EUR - 100 tickets or short date period
340 EUR - 100 tickets or short date period
360 EUR - 100 tickets or short date period
380 EUR - 100 tickets or short date period
Such approach works good on other conferences. The budget of conference
wouldn't lost this way and more people would get reduced price of
ticket. The current 100 EUR gap between early and standard is just too
much (for example for such price you can get full 3 day PyCon PL
participation including accommodation and meals... or buy a cheap
smartphone).
Financial aid programs
======================
Financial aid programs are great, because in theory they allow people
that wouldn't be able to afford participating in the conference to take
part in it. In practice also people that could otherwise afford
attending the conference apply for them and it is really hard to tell
who deserves aid and in what amount. So it produces quite a lot of
additional work and sometimes it is better to drop them and just make
tickets for everyone cheaper. It's worth considering what's better for
certain conference.
Place, venue, costs, economical situation of Europe
===================================================
I feel a bit sorry for the current EP organizers. They really wanted (in
their sense) the best - probably it was let's do a superb and shiny
European Python conference based on our previous experiences from PyCon
DE. But lets make it more awesome - capital, big and professional venue
in the center of the city, what would you expect more? Sounds great,
doesn't it? Well, if you probably live in Germany (and earn as much
money as they on average earn there) you can easily afford attending and
it's cheap as beer. But wait a minute, attendees are a bit different
that on PyCon DE, some of them come from Southern Europe, that is still
recovering from financial crisis, some live in Central and Eastern
Europe that in financial terms is still far behind western EU countries.
I don't know Germany that much, but I guess there are also cheaper than
Berlin cities in eastern part of Germany with cheaper venues etc. It
should have been taken into account by organizers (hint: quality of
venue and location costs sometimes are not the most important factors
for a successful _community_ conference).
Elite developers conference or community conferences?
=====================================================
Lately I observe some worrying trend that some of the community
conferences choose more and more prestigious places and venues with
every new editions. Islands, excellent, top quality food, all-inclusive,
top hotels etc. The result is that attendees are the ones with big
pockets/wallets, so we get a meeting of successful people ;).
The downside is that spirit of a community conference, with lots of
students, newcomers and hobbyists goes away somewhere. I'm not against
such conferences, they have a lot of value in them and different types
of conferences are needed. The question is what we actually expect from
EuroPython? What kind of conference it should be? How well Python
community is represented in EPS? These are questions that everyone
should ask themselves. I haven't seen any serious discussion about that.
Regards,
Filip
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