EuroPython 2018: Help us build the next edition!
Lemburg, Marc-Andre
EuroPython 2018: Help us build the next edition! We need help with organizing and running EuroPython 2018. In this session, we will explain how the EuroPython workgroup model works and where you could help
 So, a short introduction about the European society. We started in 2004 in Götterborg in Sweden. We had my notebook is a bit slow, sorry for that. We started in 2004 and we formed this European society to provide a legal, basically, entity to run the conference. The EPS in the early days basically was just for deciding on where to run the conference next. The actual organization at that time was basically completely done by local teams. Of course, at that time, the size of the conference was much smaller than it is now, so we didn't have more than a thousand attendees like what we have nowadays these years. It was more in the range of, let's say, 200, 300 people, so it could easily be managed by a small local team. Then afterwards, as the conference grew, we then found that it became increasingly hard to find local teams who were willing to run the conference of that size. What we did is we basically then decided that we need a new organizational model for all this and we started with that in 2014. Since 2015, we basically have the local team be integrated into the EPS work groups. It's not the local team running everything alone. It's the local team helping with the onsite questions that we have and the onsite task that we have for the conference. What is the purpose of the EPS? I'm still waiting for the slide to come. There you go. First of all, it's running your Python conferences, of course. But since last year, we've extended this scope, so we also want to help the European Python community by, for example, issuing grants to them, helping them with organizational issues like, for example, finding venues or helping them by integrating them into the conference and providing them visibility in the community. For example, we have Kuala here at the conference, who we invited for the conference to present their project here. We have Plone at the conference. These are things that we are currently doing. We're also giving out smaller grants already. For example, we sponsored PyConDE last year. We gave out coupon codes for the conference to user groups this year. We're trying to basically start this whole process. We don't have a lot of money, so it's not like the PSF with millions in the bank. We have maybe a few 10,000 euros that we can use, and we have to be very careful at the moment because the budget size that we have compared the available money that we have compared to the budget size of the EuroPython conference is really tiny. What else do we do? We also do some boring stuff like trademarks, logos, and social accounts for the EuroPython, and we protect those. How do we work? We have a model that's based on work groups, so we set up quite a few work groups to work on different things that are needed for the conference. I'm going to show you a slide with other different work groups that we have. These work groups, they work decentralized, so most remotely, except for the onsite work group, of course. It makes it possible for people from all over Europe to participate in these work groups. If you have a skill that fits a certain work group, then you can apply for that work group. If we don't have enough people in that work group, we are very glad to basically sign you up for that, and then you can help in these work groups. We decided to use this model because in the previous years, we always had the problem that when moving from one location to the next location and changing the team from one location to the next, a lot of institutional knowledge got lost. By using this work group model, it has basically, we've seen that this institutional loss of knowledge, it doesn't happen anymore. We also try to take the financial risk away from the onsite teams. We try to do everything, take the financial risk on the EPS. What we do right now, for example, is we have a local organization. We give that local organization money. They then enter the contracts with the venues for tax reasons because taxes are very complicated when doing cross-EU kind of contracts. Then the ticketing, for example, is then also done by the local organization. We basically have a contract with them to manage everything. Essentially, even though the local organization will have to enter the contracts, we provide the financial backup for everything. We make sure that the whole cash flow works out. They don't have any issues. What's the structure of the EPS? Perhaps I should have not used Tate for transitioning. What's the structure? We have a board. We have work groups. We have members. Basically, anyone can become a member. The only condition is that you've attended a EuroPython conference. What we also regard as basically not really legally in the legal sense are members of the EuroPython attendees because that's essentially the community that we have and the community that we work for. Let's have a look at how the conference developed over the years. We started in 2002 in Belgium in Charleur. Who was at that conference? One. Since then, we've come a long way. This is the 16th EuroPython that we're running. We've done EuroPythons every single year. We've had many stops throughout Europe. We were in Belgium. We were in Sweden, in the UK, in Lithuania, in Switzerland, in Italy twice now. Of course, in Bilbao, in Basque Country, in Spain. We were in Germany. As you can see, the attendee counts, they increased every single year. Except for the last few years, we basically, it seems we reached some kind of limit. Like 1200 seems to be kind of a limit where we're not growing anymore. We're currently trying to figure out why that is. This is not really bothering us much because we think that a thousand attendee conference is just fine. We're not looking for becoming a two thousand attendee conference. This is well manageable. Just have like a thousand or twelve hundred people at the conference. If you want to go to a size of a Pycon US where you have over 3,000 people, then you can no longer do it using volunteers. You have to basically organize everything professionally. Here's a short timeline of how we organize, well, it's a short timeline of how we would like to organize a EuroPython conference. This is not actually how it happened this year. This year was, we were late with everything due to some issues that we have ahead. But we still manage, as you can see. I think we did succeed in making everyone happy. I think it doesn't really show that we had so many problems going, well, basically reaching this point here. That's good. This is how we would actually like to do the conference. The first thing that we don't want to do is we don't want to have basically an empty time frame between the conference of the previous year and the selection process of the year for the next year. We want to kick up the selection process very early after the conference. We want to finalize it very early. And then, of course, we want to start launching the preview site, sign up, sign the venue contract. Venue contract was the main issue that we had last this year. So we're going to try to do that way earlier than this year. So if we're lucky, we can get it signed in October, and then we have a good basis for everything else that we need to do. Then we can prepare the sponsor brochure. We can ask sponsors to sign up for it. We can then, in parallel, work on the website, finish that, set ticket prices, and so on, so that we are ready for basically launching the website in January. And then starting the ticket sales, do the call for proposals, start the regular ticket sales. The EB ticket sales this year, they were over in a day. So we sold 200 tickets in a single day, which was amazing. And I think we're going to keep that mode. So we just set in a certain fixed number of tickets to sell. What we need to do in order to improve things is we need to get out the schedule earlier. So we need to go to the whole CFP process, the session list selection process, talk voting, and so on. We need to do that a lot earlier so that we can get the word out. And then we hope to basically increase the ticket sales as well. Because ticket sales usually pick up at the very end. So during the organization of the conference, when you look at ticket sales, you often find that, well, we've not sold enough tickets, so everything looks very risky what we're doing. But in the end, it usually works out. So we are pretty confident that we will get at least 1,000 attendees every year. And of course, you have to do some extra work like we have marketing and design workgroup, which does the conference booklet. It also does the sponsor booklet. We have lots of design work to do, like what you see around here, the venue, the signage. It was all done by the marketing and design workgroup. We have a designer in Spain that we're using for this, for the t-shirts. We have an artist from Spain as well. So over the time, we've figured out certain companies to work with. So we don't have to select them again each year. Like for example, the printer for the brochure or the printer for the t-shirts. This is all basically set, so there's nothing to worry about there, which makes things easier. Then at a certain point, you need to go to the venue and then discuss things like catering, because catering, you have to tell the caterer, well, you have to give them some numbers a few months before the conference. And then a few weeks before the conference, you have to basically set the minimum numbers. The way it works is that you tell them, okay, I'm going to have like 750 people attend on that day. The number of people who attend the day is not equal to the number of actual tickled sales that you have. So what the estimate that we usually use is, first of all, we say, okay, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we're going to have more people. On Thursday and Friday, we're going to have fewer people. Sprints, we have even less. And the general, basically, maximum number that we use for these catering numbers is 80% for the most active days. And then, of course, you need to print everything. For example, at this venue, we have this parcel company that we have to work with, so we have to send everything to that parcel company. The parcel company tells us you cannot send things too early, so you have to wait until about two weeks before the conference, where you can actually ship stuff to the conference. That makes things very hard, because you have to time things very carefully. For example, the printing of all the marketing stuff. And it sometimes works out. It sometimes doesn't work out, so you get things shipped too late. And that's an issue. But it's something that we, I mean, with the existing printers that we have, we now know how things work out, and we know how to time these things, and they usually then do work out. Okay. So how does a EuroPython workgroup work? So each workgroup has one or two chairs. You can have co-chairs. For example, the program workgroup had co-chairs, two co-chairs. But one chair basically then, because, of course, you're working with volunteers, right? So it's not like in a company, you can say, okay, you have this job, you're going to do this for the whole organizational phase. You do have to take into account that there's a real life to all this, and people have day jobs, and of course, if they change jobs or have different, I mean, basically changes in the personal situation, then of course, they may have to step down and doesn't. So you have to accommodate for that. So you usually have to, basically, the workgroups need to be organized dynamically. The chair is responsible for everything that the workgroup has to do. So if something doesn't work out, the chair has to step in. Of course, the chair also has to manage the members and then assign subtests to the various members in that group to make everything happen. And then we have voting and non-voting members. This is more like an organizational thing that we have to do in the EPS. So some members are allowed to vote when we do vote, which doesn't happen a lot. Some members are not allowed to vote. They have to be made voting members by the EPS board every now and then. And then of course, what we've seen in the last years, we always get inactive members. So some people basically, they don't tell us, but they just don't do anything anymore. So every now and then we go and then we identify the inactive members and then remove them from the workgroups. So it doesn't look like we have lots and lots of people in those workgroups. So we get more volunteers who then basically come to us and ask whether they can help, which is good. So these are the workgroups that we have. One is for conference administration. This is for signing contracts, evaluating everything. One is for finance. So the finance workgroup does the budget and controls it. We have one workgroup for sponsors, which is the one that basically does all the sponsor contacts. There's usually a lot of email going on. We have a communications workgroup for all the social websites that we have, the social channels that we have, the communication on the mobile app that we have. Everything that you get from basically from EuroPython is organized by this communications workgroup. The support workgroup is for organizing all the support, which includes everything that happens at the conference desk. It includes organizing the help desk that we have, the online help desk. So everything that has to do with supporting attendees or supporting speakers or supporting sponsors. This always goes to the support workgroup. And then in some cases, for example, for sponsors, what we do is we tell the support workgroup to basically then forward everything to the sponsors workgroup because they have more knowledge about these things. And it's similar for other workgroups, like for example, speakers. The support workgroup knows who to contact. That's the important bit. So there are some things that they can do themselves, but in some situations it's better to just move on and put the request to some other workgroup. Then we have a financial aid workgroup, which obviously does financial aid. And we have a few more. Okay. We have marketing and design. Marketing and design is responsible for all the booklets that we print, all the rollups that you can see around here, also responsible for designing logos, for choosing the colors, for example, for the website. So what we do there, for example, is we usually work together with a designer and then tell the designer roughly what kind of style we want, what kind of theme we want. We give them information about the location that we have, and then they come back to us with proposals. And then we work with them with a designer to make basically this height on one design, and then we improve that. And then the designer comes back to us with a complete corporate identity sheet, which includes everything that you normally need for these things. So you not only get a logo in various different formats and sizes, you also get a color sheet so that you exactly know which colors to use. And then we use those colors on the website, for example. So this is all done by the marketing and design workgroup. So there are two things. One is designing everything, and the other thing is printing everything. Then we have the program workgroup, which is responsible for everything that has to do with the schedule. So they essentially take care of creating the schedule, finding the speakers, selecting talks based on the talk voting, running the talk voting, and quite a few other things. Alexander can probably talk for an hour about the things that we have to do. There's lots of work going on there. Then we have the web workgroup, which is responsible for the website. So basically programming the website, updating the website, and basically make in case it goes wrong, or something goes wrong with it, then to fix it. And we have our own server for this, where we use Docker containers to run everything and all this is managed by the web workgroup. Then we have the onsite team, which is meant to be the workgroup for the people helping locally. So those should be people, ideally, with some people living in the location where we actually run the conference, but it's also okay if they are just not too far away, let's say. Because what we expect from the onsite team is that they actually can go to the venue and sort out certain things, problems that we have, ask certain things, figure out things, like I don't know whether some power sockets are available, for example, all the small little details that take up a lot of time. So these things need to be done by an onsite team. Plus, of course, we also have the issue that we need to ship things to the location, and after the conference, we need to store things for the next year. So for example, on Friday, tomorrow, we need to tear down quite a bit of the conference setting that we have here, because we're just going to do the sprints in the other part of the venue. And for that, we need to basically then put everything back into boxes, put everything into, we got a storage box here in Rimini, we're going to get a van and then move everything over. So these are things that the onsite team can help with, and this is where local teams can then really show their support. Then we have a media team, or let's say we should have a media team, right now we don't have any, because essentially the volunteers we had there were not available to provide much help. So what the media team was supposed to do is they were supposed to do the take care of the video recording that we have, basically preparing all the videos for uploads to YouTube, managing the whole process, working with the video recording company, the people you see here recording everything, we hired them to do this. And I think they're doing a very good job, and with the live streaming, I think that works really well. And so basically everything that has to do with media should be handled by that team. So if you're an expert in these things, then please do contact us because we need help. Right, the next one, the last work group that we have is the Code of Conduct work group. This is a very, this is a special work group because Code of Conduct is always something that you have to, well, you have to have lots of experience with it, it needs to be a small team because in general you need to discuss issues that happen with more than just a few people, but not too many so you don't get too many opinions so you can easily and quickly reach a decision. And basically what that work group does is it works out the Code of Conduct, updates it regularly, so we've done a few updates for this, and it also takes care of handling the issues and then also reporting the issues in the closing session. So fortunately up until now, I'm saying up until now because tonight is a social event, up until now we've not had any significant Code of Conduct issues which is really nice. We only had a few communication things that were going wrong with some sponsors. So far it's working out well, we don't have a lot to do in that work group. Okay, so how do we work together? We used to use just mailing lists and because mailing lists, I mean at some point you get so many emails that you simply just don't care anymore and you don't read them so it doesn't really help in communicating so what we thought would be a good idea is to have some kind of message on it. Because Telegram was new, I think we saw it last year, we thought it was new, we chose Telegram instead of Slack for example because Slack wouldn't give us a non-profit account. So there you go, Slack. We use Telegram now and it has been a really good success. So the interaction between the work group members has increased a lot, we can do things a lot faster and we also last year started to have a Telegram group for attendees and this has been working out really well, we started that as experiment because we weren't sure whether, well, you know, I mean if you have like 300, 400 people on a Telegram group or just any social account, 460 we have now, yeah, then of course you can get some bad actors and it can go wrong so we just, I mean every now and then we just keep an eye on it so we make sure that everything works out but so far we've not had any major issues and it's been working out really well and I think the attendees like it too so you can see that because, I mean, they are using it a lot. We also have a wiki for the internal things that we need to organize, we have Google docs, quite a few of those spreadsheets for managing things, documentation for things that are basically unstructured. We used to have guidelines, we've not really kept them up to date unfortunately so what we always try to do is we try to put all the knowledge that we have into some form of document because as we find it's very important, if someone breaks away then the knowledge breaks away too and we try to make it possible for others to pick up and then continue the work. So that's all I have to say, are there any questions? Yes, one, we don't have a session share so maybe... So which work groups need help at the moment? You mentioned the media team and the other groups are all filled or? Which work groups need help at the moment? Which of the work groups need help? You mentioned the media team needs help. Yes, just a second. We need help in... Let me go to that slide again. It's very slow. Anyway, I can tell you, we need help with the... Well, of course the onsite team always needs help but that depends on where we run the conference of course. We need help in the media work group. We need help in the communications work group. I think the program work group is mostly fine. We do need a lot of help in the sponsors work group. The sponsors work group was basically myself and Sylvia this year which is... I mean so much communication going on is just simply not enough. We need help in... Let's see, the administration work group. So basically going through all the contract work and making sure everything is all right and signing up the administration work group also takes care of signing up new volunteers which is not a very complex process but it has to be done and takes time. What else do we have? The finance work group would be good to have a few people more there especially ones that have some idea of how budgeting works. And of course we need people from the local organization in that work group as well because they usually then have to do bank transfers for example or when they do ticketing we use their PayPal account for doing ticketing and their Stripe account for the ticketing. Where else? Let's see. The support work group can use more help. Maria has been working a lot in the support work group. Maybe you can... And Jill of course, yes, Jill is the chair of the support work group. They can always use more help. I mean usually in the support work group what you do, most of the work happens on the help desk before the conference and then at the conference it just goes crazy because you have so many attendees asking you questions you don't know what to do anymore. And so on having more people on site to actually help with the support work group is very important. Okay, let's see what else. Financial aid was done by two people by Daria and Christian this year. And Larry also helped later on. She joined the team. She's not here I think. Daria is there. So yeah, they can probably use maybe a few more people. Probably not too many because they're... That was me. It's something that...well you have to decide quickly, right? Marketing design, yes, we could use more people there especially people with like...well, let's say a good taste, I don't know. People who know if something looks good and then say okay this looks good, right? That type of people. Because the actual design work is done by designers. So we're not really looking for designers but maybe people who have... Yeah, like I said, good taste. So yeah, web developer work group, we could use more people there. Unfortunately, the website is a bit of a mess to be honest. I mean the source code is just... Well, it grew organically as per that way. And it's not well documented. We had to figure out many things ourselves by basically just doing grep and then trying to figure out where everything happens in the source code. But we've managed to actually get it working and we now have a few people who actually know how things work and I think Stefan has spent a lot of time recently working on that. So Stefan is down here. And Patrick of course, yeah, there you are. And Patrick has been working a lot on the CSS and the front end side and also on the back end side. He did the porting to Django 1.8 this year. Sorry, last year he did that and then for this year. And Stefan is working on refactoring. So it does need a bit of refactoring because it has a lot of code that we really, I mean, don't really use anymore. So it can just go away. So that's like from the program work upside, I think we must integrate stuff we use better together because it's confusing and taking a lot of time actually. So essentially what you need for the web work group is you need Django skills. You need to be not afraid of entering a code base, which is huge and not documented and has several packages which should be one package but are in fact three packages. And it's layered in three layers and then where we actually only need one layer. So, yeah, I mean, it's a mess, let's be honest. And if you're not afraid of that, you can really help. Thank you. I have a question regarding maybe you can outline some challenges regarding working with volunteers because as I can imagine working with volunteers is kind of unpredictable stuff. So I'm pretty sure that right after the conference, like a lot of people try to sign up and say, hey, I want to help you. But then eventually with time people will start fading away. And this is a very challenging task for, I guess, for the head of the team to get things done and it's probably much more challenging than getting things done in a commercial organization where there are employees and they can commit to something. How do you deal with that especially? Maybe you have some secrets or something to share. No, we use water as everyone else. But it's just, yeah, it's a problem. It definitely is. What we found is that it's especially hard when volunteers who do actually work suddenly break away in the middle of the organization. And this year this has happened to us a couple of times and it was really hard for then essentially the chairs to basically fill in. So we had to do a lot of work this year, much more than it's really sustainable by any volunteer. So we had, for example, we had people working three to 400 hours on the conference, which is not something that you can ask from a volunteer. It's just way too much. Essentially what you have to do is you have to just, or what we found. Just put it that way. You have to tell volunteers what to do. What we used in the last few years was an approach where we tried to basically, well, we thought that people would work in the same way as we do as basically the main organizers. So when we see a problem, we just take it and we fix it, right? But normal, let's say, volunteer does not go into a work group he or she does not know and then just pick a problem and work on it. And so, and we were expecting that. It didn't happen. So we had quite a few volunteers sign up, but they were not really working or actively participating. And what we found helped is actually telling people what to do. And it may seem strange, but because it's like a top-down approach that you do, like, if you do that, it works really well. And people like it. People like to be told what to do. And then they've done everything and then they come back to you and they want to get a new task. And if you do that a couple of times, then they eventually start working on things themselves because they feel more confident and then they know things, how things work. And so that approach seems to be helpful. Yeah. At what time does the General Assembly start? Alex? Ah, okay.
 So, a short introduction about the European society.  We started in 2004 in Götterborg in Sweden.  We had my notebook is a bit slow, sorry for that.  We started in 2004 and we formed this European society to provide a legal, basically, entity  to run the conference.  The EPS in the early days basically was just for deciding on where to run the conference  next.  The actual organization at that time was basically completely done by local teams.  Of course, at that time, the size of the conference was much smaller than it is now, so we didn't  have more than a thousand attendees like what we have nowadays these years.  It was more in the range of, let's say, 200, 300 people, so it could easily be managed  by a small local team.  Then afterwards, as the conference grew, we then found that it became increasingly hard  to find local teams who were willing to run the conference of that size.  What we did is we basically then decided that we need a new organizational model for all  this and we started with that in 2014.  Since 2015, we basically have the local team be integrated into the EPS work groups.  It's not the local team running everything alone.  It's the local team helping with the onsite questions that we have and the onsite task  that we have for the conference.  What is the purpose of the EPS?  I'm still waiting for the slide to come.  There you go.  First of all, it's running your Python conferences, of course.  But since last year, we've extended this scope, so we also want to help the European Python  community by, for example, issuing grants to them, helping them with organizational issues  like, for example, finding venues or helping them by integrating them into the conference  and providing them visibility in the community.  For example, we have Kuala here at the conference, who we invited for the conference to present  their project here.  We have Plone at the conference.  These are things that we are currently doing.  We're also giving out smaller grants already.  For example, we sponsored PyConDE last year.  We gave out coupon codes for the conference to user groups this year.  We're trying to basically start this whole process.  We don't have a lot of money, so it's not like the PSF with millions in the bank.  We have maybe a few 10,000 euros that we can use, and we have to be very careful at the  moment because the budget size that we have compared the available money that we have  compared to the budget size of the EuroPython conference is really tiny.  What else do we do?  We also do some boring stuff like trademarks, logos, and social accounts for the EuroPython,  and we protect those.  How do we work?  We have a model that's based on work groups, so we set up quite a few work groups to work  on different things that are needed for the conference.  I'm going to show you a slide with other different work groups that we have.  These work groups, they work decentralized, so most remotely, except for the onsite work  group, of course.  It makes it possible for people from all over Europe to participate in these work groups.  If you have a skill that fits a certain work group, then you can apply for that work group.  If we don't have enough people in that work group, we are very glad to basically sign  you up for that, and then you can help in these work groups.  We decided to use this model because in the previous years, we always had the problem  that when moving from one location to the next location and changing the team from one  location to the next, a lot of institutional knowledge got lost.  By using this work group model, it has basically, we've seen that this institutional loss of  knowledge, it doesn't happen anymore.  We also try to take the financial risk away from the onsite teams.  We try to do everything, take the financial risk on the EPS.  What we do right now, for example, is we have a local organization.  We give that local organization money.  They then enter the contracts with the venues for tax reasons because taxes are very complicated  when doing cross-EU kind of contracts.  Then the ticketing, for example, is then also done by the local organization.  We basically have a contract with them to manage everything.  Essentially, even though the local organization will have to enter the contracts, we provide  the financial backup for everything.  We make sure that the whole cash flow works out.  They don't have any issues.  What's the structure of the EPS?  Perhaps I should have not used Tate for transitioning.  What's the structure?  We have a board.  We have work groups.  We have members.  Basically, anyone can become a member.  The only condition is that you've attended a EuroPython conference.  What we also regard as basically not really legally in the legal sense are members of  the EuroPython attendees because that's essentially the community that we have and the community  that we work for.  Let's have a look at how the conference developed over the years.  We started in 2002 in Belgium in Charleur.  Who was at that conference?  One.  Since then, we've come a long way.  This is the 16th EuroPython that we're running.  We've done EuroPythons every single year.  We've had many stops throughout Europe.  We were in Belgium.  We were in Sweden, in the UK, in Lithuania, in Switzerland, in Italy twice now.  Of course, in Bilbao, in Basque Country, in Spain.  We were in Germany.  As you can see, the attendee counts, they increased every single year.  Except for the last few years, we basically, it seems we reached some kind of limit.  Like 1200 seems to be kind of a limit where we're not growing anymore.  We're currently trying to figure out why that is.  This is not really bothering us much because we think that a thousand attendee conference  is just fine.  We're not looking for becoming a two thousand attendee conference.  This is well manageable.  Just have like a thousand or twelve hundred people at the conference.  If you want to go to a size of a Pycon US where you have over 3,000 people, then you  can no longer do it using volunteers.  You have to basically organize everything professionally.  Here's a short timeline of how we organize, well, it's a short timeline of how we would  like to organize a EuroPython conference.  This is not actually how it happened this year.  This year was, we were late with everything due to some issues that we have ahead.  But we still manage, as you can see.  I think we did succeed in making everyone happy.  I think it doesn't really show that we had so many problems going, well, basically reaching  this point here.  That's good.  This is how we would actually like to do the conference.  The first thing that we don't want to do is we don't want to have basically an empty  time frame between the conference of the previous year and the selection process of the  year for the next year.  We want to kick up the selection process very early after the conference.  We want to finalize it very early.  And then, of course, we want to start launching the preview site, sign up, sign the venue  contract.  Venue contract was the main issue that we had last this year.  So we're going to try to do that way earlier than this year.  So if we're lucky, we can get it signed in October, and then we have a good basis for  everything else that we need to do.  Then we can prepare the sponsor brochure.  We can ask sponsors to sign up for it.  We can then, in parallel, work on the website, finish that, set ticket prices, and so on,  so that we are ready for basically launching the website in January.  And then starting the ticket sales, do the call for proposals, start the regular ticket  sales.  The EB ticket sales this year, they were over in a day.  So we sold 200 tickets in a single day, which was amazing.  And I think we're going to keep that mode.  So we just set in a certain fixed number of tickets to sell.  What we need to do in order to improve things is we need to get out the schedule earlier.  So we need to go to the whole CFP process, the session list selection process, talk voting,  and so on.  We need to do that a lot earlier so that we can get the word out.  And then we hope to basically increase the ticket sales as well.  Because ticket sales usually pick up at the very end.  So during the organization of the conference, when you look at ticket sales, you often find  that, well, we've not sold enough tickets, so everything looks very risky what we're  doing.  But in the end, it usually works out.  So we are pretty confident that we will get at least 1,000 attendees every year.  And of course, you have to do some extra work like we have marketing and design workgroup,  which does the conference booklet.  It also does the sponsor booklet.  We have lots of design work to do, like what you see around here, the venue, the signage.  It was all done by the marketing and design workgroup.  We have a designer in Spain that we're using for this, for the t-shirts.  We have an artist from Spain as well.  So over the time, we've figured out certain companies to work with.  So we don't have to select them again each year.  Like for example, the printer for the brochure or the printer for the t-shirts.  This is all basically set, so there's nothing to worry about there, which makes things easier.  Then at a certain point, you need to go to the venue and then discuss things like catering,  because catering, you have to tell the caterer, well, you have to give them some numbers a  few months before the conference.  And then a few weeks before the conference, you have to basically set the minimum numbers.  The way it works is that you tell them, okay, I'm going to have like 750 people attend on  that day.  The number of people who attend the day is not equal to the number of actual tickled  sales that you have.  So what the estimate that we usually use is, first of all, we say, okay, on Monday, Tuesday,  and Wednesday, we're going to have more people.  On Thursday and Friday, we're going to have fewer people.  Sprints, we have even less.  And the general, basically, maximum number that we use for these catering numbers is  80% for the most active days.  And then, of course, you need to print everything.  For example, at this venue, we have this parcel company that we have to work with, so we have  to send everything to that parcel company.  The parcel company tells us you cannot send things too early, so you have to wait until  about two weeks before the conference, where you can actually ship stuff to the conference.  That makes things very hard, because you have to time things very carefully.  For example, the printing of all the marketing stuff.  And it sometimes works out.  It sometimes doesn't work out, so you get things shipped too late.  And that's an issue.  But it's something that we, I mean, with the existing printers that we have, we now know  how things work out, and we know how to time these things, and they usually then do work  out.  Okay.  So how does a EuroPython workgroup work?  So each workgroup has one or two chairs.  You can have co-chairs.  For example, the program workgroup had co-chairs, two co-chairs.  But one chair basically then, because, of course, you're working with volunteers, right?  So it's not like in a company, you can say, okay, you have this job, you're going to do  this for the whole organizational phase.  You do have to take into account that there's a real life to all this, and people have day  jobs, and of course, if they change jobs or have different, I mean, basically changes  in the personal situation, then of course, they may have to step down and doesn't.  So you have to accommodate for that.  So you usually have to, basically, the workgroups need to be organized dynamically.  The chair is responsible for everything that the workgroup has to do.  So if something doesn't work out, the chair has to step in.  Of course, the chair also has to manage the members and then assign subtests to the various  members in that group to make everything happen.  And then we have voting and non-voting members.  This is more like an organizational thing that we have to do in the EPS.  So some members are allowed to vote when we do vote, which doesn't happen a lot.  Some members are not allowed to vote.  They have to be made voting members by the EPS board every now and then.  And then of course, what we've seen in the last years, we always get inactive members.  So some people basically, they don't tell us, but they just don't do anything anymore.  So every now and then we go and then we identify the inactive members and then remove them  from the workgroups.  So it doesn't look like we have lots and lots of people in those workgroups.  So we get more volunteers who then basically come to us and ask whether they can help,  which is good.  So these are the workgroups that we have.  One is for conference administration.  This is for signing contracts, evaluating everything.  One is for finance.  So the finance workgroup does the budget and controls it.  We have one workgroup for sponsors, which is the one that basically does all the sponsor  contacts.  There's usually a lot of email going on.  We have a communications workgroup for all the social websites that we have, the social  channels that we have, the communication on the mobile app that we have.  Everything that you get from basically from EuroPython is organized by this communications  workgroup.  The support workgroup is for organizing all the support, which includes everything that  happens at the conference desk.  It includes organizing the help desk that we have, the online help desk.  So everything that has to do with supporting attendees or supporting speakers or supporting  sponsors.  This always goes to the support workgroup.  And then in some cases, for example, for sponsors, what we do is we tell the support  workgroup to basically then forward everything to the sponsors workgroup because they have  more knowledge about these things.  And it's similar for other workgroups, like for example, speakers.  The support workgroup knows who to contact.  That's the important bit.  So there are some things that they can do themselves, but in some situations it's better  to just move on and put the request to some other workgroup.  Then we have a financial aid workgroup, which obviously does financial aid.  And we have a few more.  Okay.  We have marketing and design.  Marketing and design is responsible for all the booklets that we print, all the rollups  that you can see around here, also responsible for designing logos, for choosing the colors,  for example, for the website.  So what we do there, for example, is we usually work together with a designer and then tell  the designer roughly what kind of style we want, what kind of theme we want.  We give them information about the location that we have, and then they come back to us  with proposals.  And then we work with them with a designer to make basically this height on one design,  and then we improve that.  And then the designer comes back to us with a complete corporate identity sheet, which  includes everything that you normally need for these things.  So you not only get a logo in various different formats and sizes, you also get a color sheet  so that you exactly know which colors to use.  And then we use those colors on the website, for example.  So this is all done by the marketing and design workgroup.  So there are two things.  One is designing everything, and the other thing is printing everything.  Then we have the program workgroup, which is responsible for everything that has to  do with the schedule.  So they essentially take care of creating the schedule, finding the speakers, selecting  talks based on the talk voting, running the talk voting, and quite a few other things.  Alexander can probably talk for an hour about the things that we have to do.  There's lots of work going on there.  Then we have the web workgroup, which is responsible for the website.  So basically programming the website, updating the website, and basically make in case it  goes wrong, or something goes wrong with it, then to fix it.  And we have our own server for this, where we use Docker containers to run everything  and all this is managed by the web workgroup.  Then we have the onsite team, which is meant to be the workgroup for the people helping  locally.  So those should be people, ideally, with some people living in the location where we actually  run the conference, but it's also okay if they are just not too far away, let's say.  Because what we expect from the onsite team is that they actually can go to the venue  and sort out certain things, problems that we have, ask certain things, figure out things,  like I don't know whether some power sockets are available, for example, all the small little  details that take up a lot of time.  So these things need to be done by an onsite team.  Plus, of course, we also have the issue that we need to ship things to the location, and  after the conference, we need to store things for the next year.  So for example, on Friday, tomorrow, we need to tear down quite a bit of the conference  setting that we have here, because we're just going to do the sprints in the other part  of the venue.  And for that, we need to basically then put everything back into boxes, put everything  into, we got a storage box here in Rimini, we're going to get a van and then move everything  over.  So these are things that the onsite team can help with, and this is where local teams can  then really show their support.  Then we have a media team, or let's say we should have a media team, right now we don't  have any, because essentially the volunteers we had there were not available to provide  much help.  So what the media team was supposed to do is they were supposed to do the take care of  the video recording that we have, basically preparing all the videos for uploads to YouTube,  managing the whole process, working with the video recording company, the people you see  here recording everything, we hired them to do this.  And I think they're doing a very good job, and with the live streaming, I think that  works really well.  And so basically everything that has to do with media should be handled by that team.  So if you're an expert in these things, then please do contact us because we need help.  Right, the next one, the last work group that we have is the Code of Conduct work group.  This is a very, this is a special work group because Code of Conduct is always something  that you have to, well, you have to have lots of experience with it, it needs to be a small  team because in general you need to discuss issues that happen with more than just a few  people, but not too many so you don't get too many opinions so you can easily and quickly  reach a decision.  And basically what that work group does is it works out the Code of Conduct, updates  it regularly, so we've done a few updates for this, and it also takes care of handling  the issues and then also reporting the issues in the closing session.  So fortunately up until now, I'm saying up until now because tonight is a social event,  up until now we've not had any significant Code of Conduct issues which is really nice.  We only had a few communication things that were going wrong with some sponsors.  So far it's working out well, we don't have a lot to do in that work group.  Okay, so how do we work together?  We used to use just mailing lists and because mailing lists, I mean at some point you get  so many emails that you simply just don't care anymore and you don't read them so it  doesn't really help in communicating so what we thought would be a good idea is to have  some kind of message on it.  Because Telegram was new, I think we saw it last year, we thought it was new, we chose  Telegram instead of Slack for example because Slack wouldn't give us a non-profit account.  So there you go, Slack.  We use Telegram now and it has been a really good success.  So the interaction between the work group members has increased a lot, we can do things  a lot faster and we also last year started to have a Telegram group for attendees and  this has been working out really well, we started that as experiment because we weren't  sure whether, well, you know, I mean if you have like 300, 400 people on a Telegram group  or just any social account, 460 we have now, yeah, then of course you can get some bad  actors and it can go wrong so we just, I mean every now and then we just keep an eye on  it so we make sure that everything works out but so far we've not had any major issues  and it's been working out really well and I think the attendees like it too so you can  see that because, I mean, they are using it a lot.  We also have a wiki for the internal things that we need to organize, we have Google docs,  quite a few of those spreadsheets for managing things, documentation for things that are  basically unstructured.  We used to have guidelines, we've not really kept them up to date unfortunately so what  we always try to do is we try to put all the knowledge that we have into some form of document  because as we find it's very important, if someone breaks away then the knowledge breaks  away too and we try to make it possible for others to pick up and then continue the work.  So that's all I have to say, are there any questions?  Yes, one, we don't have a session share so maybe...  So which work groups need help at the moment?  You mentioned the media team and the other groups are all filled or?  Which work groups need help at the moment?  Which of the work groups need help?  You mentioned the media team needs help.  Yes, just a second.  We need help in...  Let me go to that slide again.  It's very slow.  Anyway, I can tell you, we need help with the...  Well, of course the onsite team always needs help but that depends on where we run the  conference of course.  We need help in the media work group.  We need help in the communications work group.  I think the program work group is mostly fine.  We do need a lot of help in the sponsors work group.  The sponsors work group was basically myself and Sylvia this year which is...  I mean so much communication going on is just simply not enough.  We need help in...  Let's see, the administration work group.  So basically going through all the contract work and making sure everything is all right  and signing up the administration work group also takes care of signing up new volunteers  which is not a very complex process but it has to be done and takes time.  What else do we have?  The finance work group would be good to have a few people more there especially ones that  have some idea of how budgeting works.  And of course we need people from the local organization in that work group as well because  they usually then have to do bank transfers for example or when they do ticketing we use  their PayPal account for doing ticketing and their Stripe account for the ticketing.  Where else?  Let's see.  The support work group can use more help.  Maria has been working a lot in the support work group.  Maybe you can...  And Jill of course, yes, Jill is the chair of the support work group.  They can always use more help.  I mean usually in the support work group what you do, most of the work happens on the help  desk before the conference and then at the conference it just goes crazy because you  have so many attendees asking you questions you don't know what to do anymore.  And so on having more people on site to actually help with the support work group is very important.  Okay, let's see what else.  Financial aid was done by two people by Daria and Christian this year.  And Larry also helped later on.  She joined the team.  She's not here I think.  Daria is there.  So yeah, they can probably use maybe a few more people.  Probably not too many because they're...  That was me.  It's something that...well you have to decide quickly, right?  Marketing design, yes, we could use more people there especially people with like...well,  let's say a good taste, I don't know.  People who know if something looks good and then say okay this looks good, right?  That type of people.  Because the actual design work is done by designers.  So we're not really looking for designers but maybe people who have...  Yeah, like I said, good taste.  So yeah, web developer work group, we could use more people there.  Unfortunately, the website is a bit of a mess to be honest.  I mean the source code is just...  Well, it grew organically as per that way.  And it's not well documented.  We had to figure out many things ourselves by basically just doing grep and then trying  to figure out where everything happens in the source code.  But we've managed to actually get it working and we now have a few people who actually  know how things work and I think Stefan has spent a lot of time recently working on that.  So Stefan is down here.  And Patrick of course, yeah, there you are.  And Patrick has been working a lot on the CSS and the front end side and also on the  back end side.  He did the porting to Django 1.8 this year.  Sorry, last year he did that and then for this year.  And Stefan is working on refactoring.  So it does need a bit of refactoring because it has a lot of code that we really, I mean,  don't really use anymore.  So it can just go away.  So that's like from the program work upside, I think we must integrate stuff we use better  together because it's confusing and taking a lot of time actually.  So essentially what you need for the web work group is you need Django skills.  You need to be not afraid of entering a code base, which is huge and not documented and  has several packages which should be one package but are in fact three packages.  And it's layered in three layers and then where we actually only need one layer.  So, yeah, I mean, it's a mess, let's be honest.  And if you're not afraid of that, you can really help.  Thank you.  I have a question regarding maybe you can outline some challenges regarding working with volunteers  because as I can imagine working with volunteers is kind of unpredictable stuff.  So I'm pretty sure that right after the conference, like a lot of people try to sign up and say,  hey, I want to help you.  But then eventually with time people will start fading away.  And this is a very challenging task for, I guess, for the head of the team to get things  done and it's probably much more challenging than getting things done in a commercial organization  where there are employees and they can commit to something.  How do you deal with that especially?  Maybe you have some secrets or something to share.  No, we use water as everyone else.  But it's just, yeah, it's a problem.  It definitely is.  What we found is that it's especially hard when volunteers who do actually work suddenly  break away in the middle of the organization.  And this year this has happened to us a couple of times and it was really hard for then essentially  the chairs to basically fill in.  So we had to do a lot of work this year, much more than it's really sustainable by any volunteer.  So we had, for example, we had people working three to 400 hours on the conference, which  is not something that you can ask from a volunteer.  It's just way too much.  Essentially what you have to do is you have to just, or what we found.  Just put it that way.  You have to tell volunteers what to do.  What we used in the last few years was an approach where we tried to basically, well,  we thought that people would work in the same way as we do as basically the main organizers.  So when we see a problem, we just take it and we fix it, right?  But normal, let's say, volunteer does not go into a work group he or she does not know  and then just pick a problem and work on it.  And so, and we were expecting that.  It didn't happen.  So we had quite a few volunteers sign up, but they were not really working or actively  participating.  And what we found helped is actually telling people what to do.  And it may seem strange, but because it's like a top-down approach that you do, like,  if you do that, it works really well.  And people like it.  People like to be told what to do.  And then they've done everything and then they come back to you and they want to get  a new task.  And if you do that a couple of times, then they eventually start working on things themselves  because they feel more confident and then they know things, how things work.  And so that approach seems to be helpful.  Yeah.  At what time does the General Assembly start?  Alex?  Ah, okay.
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So, a short introduction about the European society. We started in 2004 in Götterborg in Sweden. We had my notebook is a bit slow, sorry for that. We started in 2004 and we formed this European society to provide a legal, basically, entity to run the conference. The EPS in the early days basically was just for deciding on where to run the conference next. The actual organization at that time was basically completely done by local teams. Of course, at that time, the size of the conference was much smaller than it is now, so we didn't have more than a thousand attendees like what we have nowadays these years. It was more in the range of, let's say, 200, 300 people, so it could easily be managed by a small local team. Then afterwards, as the conference grew, we then found that it became increasingly hard to find local teams who were willing to run the conference of that size. What we did is we basically then decided that we need a new organizational model for all this and we started with that in 2014. Since 2015, we basically have the local team be integrated into the EPS work groups. It's not the local team running everything alone. It's the local team helping with the onsite questions that we have and the onsite task that we have for the conference. What is the purpose of the EPS? I'm still waiting for the slide to come. There you go. First of all, it's running your Python conferences, of course. But since last year, we've extended this scope, so we also want to help the European Python community by, for example, issuing grants to them, helping them with organizational issues like, for example, finding venues or helping them by integrating them into the conference and providing them visibility in the community. For example, we have Kuala here at the conference, who we invited for the conference to present their project here. We have Plone at the conference. These are things that we are currently doing. We're also giving out smaller grants already. For example, we sponsored PyConDE last year. We gave out coupon codes for the conference to user groups this year. We're trying to basically start this whole process. We don't have a lot of money, so it's not like the PSF with millions in the bank. We have maybe a few 10,000 euros that we can use, and we have to be very careful at the moment because the budget size that we have compared the available money that we have compared to the budget size of the EuroPython conference is really tiny. What else do we do? We also do some boring stuff like trademarks, logos, and social accounts for the EuroPython, and we protect those. How do we work? We have a model that's based on work groups, so we set up quite a few work groups to work on different things that are needed for the conference. I'm going to show you a slide with other different work groups that we have. These work groups, they work decentralized, so most remotely, except for the onsite work group, of course. It makes it possible for people from all over Europe to participate in these work groups. If you have a skill that fits a certain work group, then you can apply for that work group. If we don't have enough people in that work group, we are very glad to basically sign you up for that, and then you can help in these work groups. We decided to use this model because in the previous years, we always had the problem that when moving from one location to the next location and changing the team from one location to the next, a lot of institutional knowledge got lost. By using this work group model, it has basically, we've seen that this institutional loss of knowledge, it doesn't happen anymore. We also try to take the financial risk away from the onsite teams. We try to do everything, take the financial risk on the EPS. What we do right now, for example, is we have a local organization. We give that local organization money. They then enter the contracts with the venues for tax reasons because taxes are very complicated when doing cross-EU kind of contracts. Then the ticketing, for example, is then also done by the local organization. We basically have a contract with them to manage everything. Essentially, even though the local organization will have to enter the contracts, we provide the financial backup for everything. We make sure that the whole cash flow works out. They don't have any issues. What's the structure of the EPS? Perhaps I should have not used Tate for transitioning. What's the structure? We have a board. We have work groups. We have members. Basically, anyone can become a member. The only condition is that you've attended a EuroPython conference. What we also regard as basically not really legally in the legal sense are members of the EuroPython attendees because that's essentially the community that we have and the community that we work for. Let's have a look at how the conference developed over the years. We started in 2002 in Belgium in Charleur. Who was at that conference? One. Since then, we've come a long way. This is the 16th EuroPython that we're running. We've done EuroPythons every single year. We've had many stops throughout Europe. We were in Belgium. We were in Sweden, in the UK, in Lithuania, in Switzerland, in Italy twice now. Of course, in Bilbao, in Basque Country, in Spain. We were in Germany. As you can see, the attendee counts, they increased every single year. Except for the last few years, we basically, it seems we reached some kind of limit. Like 1200 seems to be kind of a limit where we're not growing anymore. We're currently trying to figure out why that is. This is not really bothering us much because we think that a thousand attendee conference is just fine. We're not looking for becoming a two thousand attendee conference. This is well manageable. Just have like a thousand or twelve hundred people at the conference. If you want to go to a size of a Pycon US where you have over 3,000 people, then you can no longer do it using volunteers. You have to basically organize everything professionally. Here's a short timeline of how we organize, well, it's a short timeline of how we would like to organize a EuroPython conference. This is not actually how it happened this year. This year was, we were late with everything due to some issues that we have ahead. But we still manage, as you can see. I think we did succeed in making everyone happy. I think it doesn't really show that we had so many problems going, well, basically reaching this point here. That's good. This is how we would actually like to do the conference. The first thing that we don't want to do is we don't want to have basically an empty time frame between the conference of the previous year and the selection process of the year for the next year. We want to kick up the selection process very early after the conference. We want to finalize it very early. And then, of course, we want to start launching the preview site, sign up, sign the venue contract. Venue contract was the main issue that we had last this year. So we're going to try to do that way earlier than this year. So if we're lucky, we can get it signed in October, and then we have a good basis for everything else that we need to do. Then we can prepare the sponsor brochure. We can ask sponsors to sign up for it. We can then, in parallel, work on the website, finish that, set ticket prices, and so on, so that we are ready for basically launching the website in January. And then starting the ticket sales, do the call for proposals, start the regular ticket sales. The EB ticket sales this year, they were over in a day. So we sold 200 tickets in a single day, which was amazing. And I think we're going to keep that mode. So we just set in a certain fixed number of tickets to sell. What we need to do in order to improve things is we need to get out the schedule earlier. So we need to go to the whole CFP process, the session list selection process, talk voting, and so on. We need to do that a lot earlier so that we can get the word out. And then we hope to basically increase the ticket sales as well. Because ticket sales usually pick up at the very end. So during the organization of the conference, when you look at ticket sales, you often find that, well, we've not sold enough tickets, so everything looks very risky what we're doing. But in the end, it usually works out. So we are pretty confident that we will get at least 1,000 attendees every year. And of course, you have to do some extra work like we have marketing and design workgroup, which does the conference booklet. It also does the sponsor booklet. We have lots of design work to do, like what you see around here, the venue, the signage. It was all done by the marketing and design workgroup. We have a designer in Spain that we're using for this, for the t-shirts. We have an artist from Spain as well. So over the time, we've figured out certain companies to work with. So we don't have to select them again each year. Like for example, the printer for the brochure or the printer for the t-shirts. This is all basically set, so there's nothing to worry about there, which makes things easier. Then at a certain point, you need to go to the venue and then discuss things like catering, because catering, you have to tell the caterer, well, you have to give them some numbers a few months before the conference. And then a few weeks before the conference, you have to basically set the minimum numbers. The way it works is that you tell them, okay, I'm going to have like 750 people attend on that day. The number of people who attend the day is not equal to the number of actual tickled sales that you have. So what the estimate that we usually use is, first of all, we say, okay, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, we're going to have more people. On Thursday and Friday, we're going to have fewer people. Sprints, we have even less. And the general, basically, maximum number that we use for these catering numbers is 80% for the most active days. And then, of course, you need to print everything. For example, at this venue, we have this parcel company that we have to work with, so we have to send everything to that parcel company. The parcel company tells us you cannot send things too early, so you have to wait until about two weeks before the conference, where you can actually ship stuff to the conference. That makes things very hard, because you have to time things very carefully. For example, the printing of all the marketing stuff. And it sometimes works out. It sometimes doesn't work out, so you get things shipped too late. And that's an issue. But it's something that we, I mean, with the existing printers that we have, we now know how things work out, and we know how to time these things, and they usually then do work out. Okay. So how does a EuroPython workgroup work? So each workgroup has one or two chairs. You can have co-chairs. For example, the program workgroup had co-chairs, two co-chairs. But one chair basically then, because, of course, you're working with volunteers, right? So it's not like in a company, you can say, okay, you have this job, you're going to do this for the whole organizational phase. You do have to take into account that there's a real life to all this, and people have day jobs, and of course, if they change jobs or have different, I mean, basically changes in the personal situation, then of course, they may have to step down and doesn't. So you have to accommodate for that. So you usually have to, basically, the workgroups need to be organized dynamically. The chair is responsible for everything that the workgroup has to do. So if something doesn't work out, the chair has to step in. Of course, the chair also has to manage the members and then assign subtests to the various members in that group to make everything happen. And then we have voting and non-voting members. This is more like an organizational thing that we have to do in the EPS. So some members are allowed to vote when we do vote, which doesn't happen a lot. Some members are not allowed to vote. They have to be made voting members by the EPS board every now and then. And then of course, what we've seen in the last years, we always get inactive members. So some people basically, they don't tell us, but they just don't do anything anymore. So every now and then we go and then we identify the inactive members and then remove them from the workgroups. So it doesn't look like we have lots and lots of people in those workgroups. So we get more volunteers who then basically come to us and ask whether they can help, which is good. So these are the workgroups that we have. One is for conference administration. This is for signing contracts, evaluating everything. One is for finance. So the finance workgroup does the budget and controls it. We have one workgroup for sponsors, which is the one that basically does all the sponsor contacts. There's usually a lot of email going on. We have a communications workgroup for all the social websites that we have, the social channels that we have, the communication on the mobile app that we have. Everything that you get from basically from EuroPython is organized by this communications workgroup. The support workgroup is for organizing all the support, which includes everything that happens at the conference desk. It includes organizing the help desk that we have, the online help desk. So everything that has to do with supporting attendees or supporting speakers or supporting sponsors. This always goes to the support workgroup. And then in some cases, for example, for sponsors, what we do is we tell the support workgroup to basically then forward everything to the sponsors workgroup because they have more knowledge about these things. And it's similar for other workgroups, like for example, speakers. The support workgroup knows who to contact. That's the important bit. So there are some things that they can do themselves, but in some situations it's better to just move on and put the request to some other workgroup. Then we have a financial aid workgroup, which obviously does financial aid. And we have a few more. Okay. We have marketing and design. Marketing and design is responsible for all the booklets that we print, all the rollups that you can see around here, also responsible for designing logos, for choosing the colors, for example, for the website. So what we do there, for example, is we usually work together with a designer and then tell the designer roughly what kind of style we want, what kind of theme we want. We give them information about the location that we have, and then they come back to us with proposals. And then we work with them with a designer to make basically this height on one design, and then we improve that. And then the designer comes back to us with a complete corporate identity sheet, which includes everything that you normally need for these things. So you not only get a logo in various different formats and sizes, you also get a color sheet so that you exactly know which colors to use. And then we use those colors on the website, for example. So this is all done by the marketing and design workgroup. So there are two things. One is designing everything, and the other thing is printing everything. Then we have the program workgroup, which is responsible for everything that has to do with the schedule. So they essentially take care of creating the schedule, finding the speakers, selecting talks based on the talk voting, running the talk voting, and quite a few other things. Alexander can probably talk for an hour about the things that we have to do. There's lots of work going on there. Then we have the web workgroup, which is responsible for the website. So basically programming the website, updating the website, and basically make in case it goes wrong, or something goes wrong with it, then to fix it. And we have our own server for this, where we use Docker containers to run everything and all this is managed by the web workgroup. Then we have the onsite team, which is meant to be the workgroup for the people helping locally. So those should be people, ideally, with some people living in the location where we actually run the conference, but it's also okay if they are just not too far away, let's say. Because what we expect from the onsite team is that they actually can go to the venue and sort out certain things, problems that we have, ask certain things, figure out things, like I don't know whether some power sockets are available, for example, all the small little details that take up a lot of time. So these things need to be done by an onsite team. Plus, of course, we also have the issue that we need to ship things to the location, and after the conference, we need to store things for the next year. So for example, on Friday, tomorrow, we need to tear down quite a bit of the conference setting that we have here, because we're just going to do the sprints in the other part of the venue. And for that, we need to basically then put everything back into boxes, put everything into, we got a storage box here in Rimini, we're going to get a van and then move everything over. So these are things that the onsite team can help with, and this is where local teams can then really show their support. Then we have a media team, or let's say we should have a media team, right now we don't have any, because essentially the volunteers we had there were not available to provide much help. So what the media team was supposed to do is they were supposed to do the take care of the video recording that we have, basically preparing all the videos for uploads to YouTube, managing the whole process, working with the video recording company, the people you see here recording everything, we hired them to do this. And I think they're doing a very good job, and with the live streaming, I think that works really well. And so basically everything that has to do with media should be handled by that team. So if you're an expert in these things, then please do contact us because we need help. Right, the next one, the last work group that we have is the Code of Conduct work group. This is a very, this is a special work group because Code of Conduct is always something that you have to, well, you have to have lots of experience with it, it needs to be a small team because in general you need to discuss issues that happen with more than just a few people, but not too many so you don't get too many opinions so you can easily and quickly reach a decision. And basically what that work group does is it works out the Code of Conduct, updates it regularly, so we've done a few updates for this, and it also takes care of handling the issues and then also reporting the issues in the closing session. So fortunately up until now, I'm saying up until now because tonight is a social event, up until now we've not had any significant Code of Conduct issues which is really nice. We only had a few communication things that were going wrong with some sponsors. So far it's working out well, we don't have a lot to do in that work group. Okay, so how do we work together? We used to use just mailing lists and because mailing lists, I mean at some point you get so many emails that you simply just don't care anymore and you don't read them so it doesn't really help in communicating so what we thought would be a good idea is to have some kind of message on it. Because Telegram was new, I think we saw it last year, we thought it was new, we chose Telegram instead of Slack for example because Slack wouldn't give us a non-profit account. So there you go, Slack. We use Telegram now and it has been a really good success. So the interaction between the work group members has increased a lot, we can do things a lot faster and we also last year started to have a Telegram group for attendees and this has been working out really well, we started that as experiment because we weren't sure whether, well, you know, I mean if you have like 300, 400 people on a Telegram group or just any social account, 460 we have now, yeah, then of course you can get some bad actors and it can go wrong so we just, I mean every now and then we just keep an eye on it so we make sure that everything works out but so far we've not had any major issues and it's been working out really well and I think the attendees like it too so you can see that because, I mean, they are using it a lot. We also have a wiki for the internal things that we need to organize, we have Google docs, quite a few of those spreadsheets for managing things, documentation for things that are basically unstructured. We used to have guidelines, we've not really kept them up to date unfortunately so what we always try to do is we try to put all the knowledge that we have into some form of document because as we find it's very important, if someone breaks away then the knowledge breaks away too and we try to make it possible for others to pick up and then continue the work. So that's all I have to say, are there any questions? Yes, one, we don't have a session share so maybe... So which work groups need help at the moment? You mentioned the media team and the other groups are all filled or? Which work groups need help at the moment? Which of the work groups need help? You mentioned the media team needs help. Yes, just a second. We need help in... Let me go to that slide again. It's very slow. Anyway, I can tell you, we need help with the... Well, of course the onsite team always needs help but that depends on where we run the conference of course. We need help in the media work group. We need help in the communications work group. I think the program work group is mostly fine. We do need a lot of help in the sponsors work group. The sponsors work group was basically myself and Sylvia this year which is... I mean so much communication going on is just simply not enough. We need help in... Let's see, the administration work group. So basically going through all the contract work and making sure everything is all right and signing up the administration work group also takes care of signing up new volunteers which is not a very complex process but it has to be done and takes time. What else do we have? The finance work group would be good to have a few people more there especially ones that have some idea of how budgeting works. And of course we need people from the local organization in that work group as well because they usually then have to do bank transfers for example or when they do ticketing we use their PayPal account for doing ticketing and their Stripe account for the ticketing. Where else? Let's see. The support work group can use more help. Maria has been working a lot in the support work group. Maybe you can... And Jill of course, yes, Jill is the chair of the support work group. They can always use more help. I mean usually in the support work group what you do, most of the work happens on the help desk before the conference and then at the conference it just goes crazy because you have so many attendees asking you questions you don't know what to do anymore. And so on having more people on site to actually help with the support work group is very important. Okay, let's see what else. Financial aid was done by two people by Daria and Christian this year. And Larry also helped later on. She joined the team. She's not here I think. Daria is there. So yeah, they can probably use maybe a few more people. Probably not too many because they're... That was me. It's something that...well you have to decide quickly, right? Marketing design, yes, we could use more people there especially people with like...well, let's say a good taste, I don't know. People who know if something looks good and then say okay this looks good, right? That type of people. Because the actual design work is done by designers. So we're not really looking for designers but maybe people who have... Yeah, like I said, good taste. So yeah, web developer work group, we could use more people there. Unfortunately, the website is a bit of a mess to be honest. I mean the source code is just... Well, it grew organically as per that way. And it's not well documented. We had to figure out many things ourselves by basically just doing grep and then trying to figure out where everything happens in the source code. But we've managed to actually get it working and we now have a few people who actually know how things work and I think Stefan has spent a lot of time recently working on that. So Stefan is down here. And Patrick of course, yeah, there you are. And Patrick has been working a lot on the CSS and the front end side and also on the back end side. He did the porting to Django 1.8 this year. Sorry, last year he did that and then for this year. And Stefan is working on refactoring. So it does need a bit of refactoring because it has a lot of code that we really, I mean, don't really use anymore. So it can just go away. So that's like from the program work upside, I think we must integrate stuff we use better together because it's confusing and taking a lot of time actually. So essentially what you need for the web work group is you need Django skills. You need to be not afraid of entering a code base, which is huge and not documented and has several packages which should be one package but are in fact three packages. And it's layered in three layers and then where we actually only need one layer. So, yeah, I mean, it's a mess, let's be honest. And if you're not afraid of that, you can really help. Thank you. I have a question regarding maybe you can outline some challenges regarding working with volunteers because as I can imagine working with volunteers is kind of unpredictable stuff. So I'm pretty sure that right after the conference, like a lot of people try to sign up and say, hey, I want to help you. But then eventually with time people will start fading away. And this is a very challenging task for, I guess, for the head of the team to get things done and it's probably much more challenging than getting things done in a commercial organization where there are employees and they can commit to something. How do you deal with that especially? Maybe you have some secrets or something to share. No, we use water as everyone else. But it's just, yeah, it's a problem. It definitely is. What we found is that it's especially hard when volunteers who do actually work suddenly break away in the middle of the organization. And this year this has happened to us a couple of times and it was really hard for then essentially the chairs to basically fill in. So we had to do a lot of work this year, much more than it's really sustainable by any volunteer. So we had, for example, we had people working three to 400 hours on the conference, which is not something that you can ask from a volunteer. It's just way too much. Essentially what you have to do is you have to just, or what we found. Just put it that way. You have to tell volunteers what to do. What we used in the last few years was an approach where we tried to basically, well, we thought that people would work in the same way as we do as basically the main organizers. So when we see a problem, we just take it and we fix it, right? But normal, let's say, volunteer does not go into a work group he or she does not know and then just pick a problem and work on it. And so, and we were expecting that. It didn't happen. So we had quite a few volunteers sign up, but they were not really working or actively participating. And what we found helped is actually telling people what to do. And it may seem strange, but because it's like a top-down approach that you do, like, if you do that, it works really well. And people like it. People like to be told what to do. And then they've done everything and then they come back to you and they want to get a new task. And if you do that a couple of times, then they eventually start working on things themselves because they feel more confident and then they know things, how things work. And so that approach seems to be helpful. Yeah. At what time does the General Assembly start? Alex? Ah, okay.
So how does a EuroPython workgroup work? So each onsite team can help with, and this is where because we need help. Right, the next one, the media work group. We need help in the