 Welcome to the conference. Welcome to EuroPython 2020. This is our 19th EuroPython conference. We have come a long way. It's the first time we are doing this online, but we still sold over 1,000 tickets. We have way more people from different countries. We have 69 countries represented in the audience now, which is, I think, extremely diverse, and it's really a worldwide kind of conference. We are up 40 countries compared to last year when we had the in-person conference. This is really exciting. We also especially want to welcome all the new EuroPythonists. If this is your first EuroPython, then we really like to invite you to enjoy the conference. We are a bit sorry that it's online, it's not in-person, but maybe that's actually a chance for you to join the conference more easily. We'd like to ask all the regular people who have joined EuroPython in the previous years to help all the newcomers and make them feel at home, because this is your conference, right? The conference is basically what you make it. We can provide the framing, we can provide the technology, we can do some moderation, but that's it. Everything else is basically coming from the attendees. We want big families, so I would like to ask everyone to help everyone else. We'd also welcome our sponsors. Actually, I think I just did a mistake here, because the screen sharing isn't advancing to the next slide. We'd also like to welcome our sponsors. Without the sponsors, the EuroPython conference wouldn't be as affordable as it is. We very much appreciate their help in making this happen. We have a sponsor exhibit on Discord, which, similarly to how we run the tracks, links to the different Zoom rooms that we have for the sponsors. I would really like to ask you to stop by on Discord and then also maybe chat with the sponsors using their Zoom rooms. They have lots of interesting swag, lots of interesting topics to discuss, and it's certainly worth having a chat with them. Thank you very much for the sponsors, and let me maybe play a bit of an applause here. All this has to happen virtually, of course. For me, it's a bit strange, because I'm used to talking in front of many, many people, and I can see their reactions right now. Basically, I just have to talk into the webcam. It's a bit strange. Of course, we missed Dublin, right? We wanted to do the conference in Dublin. What we decided is to postpone the conference in Dublin to next year, so we already have dates for next year. You can record the dates already. When we're ready to start ticket sales, of course, we will let you know. It's basically the same week next year, last week of July, and we really hope to see lots of you in Dublin next year. Hopefully, it can happen next year. We don't know how COVID-19 develops, which is the main cause for doing this online. In March, we were basically set up to start the conference, to start the ticket sales for Dublin, so we had everything set up, and then COVID-19 got in the way. We had to cancel the event in Dublin because it wouldn't have been possible for many people to attend. It wasn't clear at that time whether we could actually run the event, because it's a fairly large event, and so we decided to then do things online. I have a talk about this tomorrow, where I will go into more detail about these things, and then you can also ask questions. Doing this online is, of course, a huge challenge, and it was a lot of hard work for us. We took four months to get everything set up, to work everything out, but we still have a very fantastic team of volunteers helping us with this, and I'd like to show you a collage of all the pictures that we got from the volunteers. Not all of them are on this collage. We didn't get all the pictures in time, but this is our team. These are the people running the conference for you. I think, again, they deserve a big applause, so let's play an applause here. The EuroPython Conference, as you might know, is backed by the EuroPython Society, which is a nonprofit organization registered in Sweden. We've run EuroPython for many years now. It's entirely volunteer-driven, so no one gets paid for what we're doing here. Everything is basically done to support the European Python community. We give out grants to other conferences and projects. All the proceeds from the conference go to that purpose. Everything is basically re-spent in form of grants. How will we run the conference? EuroPython 2020 online is going to have to be run on a platform, of course. We chose Discord for this, because it offers all the tooling that we need for running the conference. Discord is mainly a chat platform. You can also use it for audio, but we're not really doing that much. We do put all the links on Discord, and the links then go to Zoom and YouTube for running everything in the audio-visual and have more interactivity. What we do is we use Zoom, the Zoom webinars for the main tracks and Zoom rooms for everything else. We also stream the four main tracks to YouTube, so you can watch those there as well. How does it work? I just want to give you a very brief introduction. What you see on the right here is the Discord window. On the left part you see lots of channels. On the right part you see all the people that are online at the moment. We have several different categories in here. Like I mentioned, we have a sponsor exhibit, which I would like to point you to, but we also have other categories for the conference tracks, for the sprints. We have created what we call breakout rooms. We have one channel per talk that we are going to have at the conference. Those talk channels can be used by the speakers to provide additional information. And of course for you to ask questions, in addition to the questions that you can ask right after the session in the Q&A. There are a couple of things I wanted to mention about Discord. One is that, which may not necessarily be obvious to people new to Discord, you can click on the titles of the channels. The titles are, I don't know if you can see my mouse pointer, but it says welcome here. If you click on this welcome, it doesn't actually show, but if you go to the main tracks, for example, you can then see all the links to Zoom, to YouTube, and all the other links that we put in there. That's a very easy way to go to all the sessions, because we have quite a few channels on Discord. It's a good idea to have a quick search. Ctrl K gives you that quick search, so you can just type Ctrl K and then you go immediately into the search. Because we're going to have lots of notifications on Discord, I just wanted to mention that you can mute categories. If you right-click on a category, then it has this mute category setting, and you can click that to have less notifications. Very important, I want to mention, is that we would like to ask you not to share the links that we have on Discord outside the conference. We want to avoid having spammers enter, for example, the Zoom rooms and the Zoom webinars. We also want to keep the YouTube channel links just within the conference, because the YouTube links are unprotected. Lots of people have paid for the ticket. Actually, most people. We want to give the advantage of the paid tickets to the persons who have paid, and not necessarily make things available outside. You can use the YouTube channel for going back in history, but I'm going to come to that later on. This is a screenshot of a typical Zoom webinar and the Zoom rooms. They look very similar. We're using the webinars for the tracks that have lots of people on. We're using the rooms for all the smaller ones. Zoom is very easy to use. It's very easy to get acquainted with. As an attendee, you can use the raise hand feature, for example. There are some features in the panel where you can give some feedback. In the Zoom rooms, you can also, if the hosts allow, you can also use a video and audio if the host permits this. The YouTube streaming, like I said, we're mostly doing that to give you a way to replay past sessions. It has this nice feature that there's a scroll bar at the bottom where you can go and then go back in time. If you miss a session, maybe you can only watch one track at a time, then you can go back and then replay that session. This is only available for the main tracks, though. Then we also have a conference back. Of course, it's digital because everything is digital this year. This is a page on the website, which has a secret link. We're going to post that to Discord in a bit. You can get coupon codes there, drop offers, lots of free stuff. All the sponsors have posted something there. It's definitely something worth checking out. For the program, we have a number of keynotes. Five keynotes in total. We have a keynote from Guido. He's going to do a Q&A. We have Naomi. She is the former chair of the Python Software Foundation. We have Cedar, Jessica McKellar, you probably know as well, and Alejandro. The first keynote is going to be Cedar Ganju. We are still having a bit of an issue finding her, but let's see how that goes. I hope she can join in time. Then we have, of course, all the events. We have talks. We have poster sessions. We have a complete data science track. If you're interested in data science, we've tried to put all the talks of data science related into the period track. You can stay in that one track. But other talks on other channels are data science related as well. Nowadays, lots of things are happening in data science. We have an open space. Open space is something that where you can self-organize. We have a hallway session. The hallway session is, of course, just a chat on Discord. There's a hallway chat for this. We have a recruitment session in case you're looking for a job, and we have sprints on the weekend. A bit more about open spaces. Open spaces are entirely self-organized. These are basically sessions that you organize and run. We will have a schedule on Discord in form of a Google Sheet where you can register and reserve a slot for you. If you enter those rooms, you can ask one of the organizers to make you a co-host in those rooms and then you can run your sessions. We have two of these rooms. If you have something to talk about, you can go there. We also have lightning talks, something very interesting, very funny usually. These are five-minute talks. If you don't know what a lightning talk is, you can sign up for these on the Google Sheet. We'll announce on Discord. We're going to have one of these sheets per day and it's first come, first serve on these Google Sheets. If you manage to get a slot, then you're lucky because they usually sign up very, very quickly. We're going to put these online, I think, after the keynote and the same tomorrow. Then we have a social event and an after-party. One is tonight rather late. It starts at 10 after the keynote. Then we have an after-party tomorrow after the closing session. We're going to have games, we're going to have music. We can play board games, basically whatever you come up with. We have planned a few things, but we are pretty open to anything that you might want to suggest. This is going to be done interactive. Let's see how that goes, doing something like a social event or after-party online. We have a kind of conduct, of course. In very short terms, it's be nice to each other. Be helpful, be gentle on everyone. Everyone wants to enjoy the conference, wants to be appreciated. We also ask to be professional and also to don't spam. This is particularly for sponsors or for companies joining the event, not as a sponsor. This applies to the whole event. If you have a Code of Conduct issue, then you can go to the contact page that we have on the website. You can contact us individually or you can on Discord. You can mention at COC and then we will see that and then we can talk to you. We will talk to one of the organizers to put you in touch with us. The people in charge are Valeria, Sylvia, Anders and myself for the Code of Conduct team. That's all I wanted to say, so enjoy the conference. Now I have to see what my room manager has to say. I'm back again, sorry for being muted. I was talking to the room manager. Originally the plan was to have Sida give a keynote now, but very unfortunately she has not yet shown up and I'm afraid we will have to skip this keynote. Of course this is not ideal because it's the first talk of the conference. But we tried everything, we tried reaching her. It wasn't possible, so maybe something got in the way. I think what we can do now is basically just wait. You can get acquainted with Discord and actually perhaps we can use this session to help you a bit with Discord. So if you have questions about Discord please write into the Q&A and then we can try to answer those. There's one question in here for example from Simon or Skymon. I can't really pronounce this, sorry. It says, is it okay to show YouTube links after the conference is over? What we're going to do there is we are going to have cut videos after the conference. We're going to have a company do those and it's going to take a few weeks to have them online and then you can share those links after the conference. We're going to have to see whether you can share the archives that are going to be created for the YouTube streams right after the conference as well. It's rather likely that we're going to do that and then perhaps one of the community members goes in and as temporary measure creates one of these sheets where you can then directly jump into the streams. So that's what we're going to do. Let me see what else we have. How many countries are represented at EuroPython? Like I said in the introduction, well yesterday we had 69 countries represented which is 40 countries more than last year. I think that's a very good sign that this online format actually does give us more reach and it makes it possible for many more people to actually attend the conference. This is very nice, of course. We're very happy about this. We're also very happy that we have over 1,000 ticket registrations for the conference, both for the conference and sprints. So this has been a really good success. So it says here, please Mark explain that the Q&A are being held in the Zoom app. For people on YouTube, of course, you cannot enter any questions. If you want to enter questions, you have to join the Zoom session in order to be able to put questions there and then have them answered. Let me see what else do we have. Everyone appreciates our effort. That's very nice. Thank you very much. Someone is suggesting here that if you have a second screen, it may be useful to open the Discord track. Yes, that's certainly a good way to set up your gear. If you have a second screen, then you can have the webinar open on one screen and the Discord open on the other one. For these online conferences, it's usually a very good idea to have lots of screens. So if you have two screens, that's very good already. If you have three screens, that's even better. Another question, will the passwords for the Zoom conference change over time or remain the same all along? So for the Zoom webinars and the rooms, everything is going to stay the same. The YouTube links, though, they are going to change tomorrow because you can only stream for one day. Tomorrow we are going to update the links on YouTube to the new ones. Can you show some pause video with audio in the pause so we get less questions? Yes, we are going to try to do that. We need to figure out whether we can make that happen because in order to show a video, someone has to be running it and because Zoom works by using screen sharing, that could get in the way of the organizer doing other things. So we are not sure whether we can actually do that. But let's see how it goes. Any other questions? Paul asked that we thank all the people involved in the event. Yes, I did that in the opening session. So maybe I can just share the slide again. Let me just do that, share the screen. So these are all the people, all the people for whom we have photos. There are actually a few more people. The team is bigger than usual. We had to grow the team a lot in order to make the online conference happen. It's a major effort pulling off one of these online conferences. It's not something that you can do by using just the six people that we are in the Euro-Python board. We thank this team really a lot. We appreciate their work, everything they did. But like someone else said, this is actually for the closing session. So I'm just going to show this slide and keep this slide open. Okay, there's a question about the logo. So the logo up here, I can explain a bit. This is actually the logo that was designed for the Dublin event. And this is because we always try to make the logo represent what we do at the conference and where we have the conference. So the clover there is something very typical of Ireland. The harp that you see there is also something very typical for Ireland. And the designer chose these two elements to then represent Dublin. We all think it's a very nice logo and that's why we kept it for the online event as well. Also a bit in recognition of that we wanted to do everything in Dublin. We're going to keep that logo for next year as well. So essentially just at the time and the location is going to change. There's a question here about talks live or pre-recorded. We are going to try to have all the talks live and not pre-recorded. Of course, we can use pre-recorded sessions in case there's a problem with the internet connection. But we'd like to have all the speakers actually talk live because this is supposed to be a live conference. We want to have this interactivity. And that's why we basically told all the speakers that we want to have them speak live. Some more questions. There's one question about clicking on the Discord channel name. So maybe I can just share my Discord and show you. So what I meant with that is that, for example, you go to the conference tracks here and you want to go to this track. Then what you do here is you click on the track first and then up here there's a title bar. And in this title bar we have all the links and you can click on that and then a dialogue opens up and you can see all the links. You can click on them here. What else do we have? There's a question about how we set up things for the conference. I'm going to talk about that tomorrow but I can also mention right now that we test a lot of different systems and we chose Zoom because it's both easy to use for the attendees and it's also scalable for us. We had to scale up a lot for the conference because we will typically have lots of people joining the events and that's why we used the webinar setup for the main tracks and then the Zoom rooms, they can have up to 300 people in the rooms. So that's a very nice way of working with an online conference system. We did not have to have a special setup, it was just the standard packages so there was nothing extra. It's just that you need to buy the right things. What will happen with the Discord server after the conference? After the conference, we are going to leave the Discord server open so that all the resources that get shared, especially in the talk breakout rooms, we're going to leave those in place to serve as a reference. We are thinking about maybe using Discord next year as well for the in-person event but we haven't decided that yet. Is Sidder going to record her keynote session offline later? Actually, that's a good idea. So I think we can ask her to do that and then maybe we can share the YouTube link later on so that you can then go back and then see that keynote as well. The Lightning Talks, Ben asked how the Lightning Talks are going to work today. These proposals can be submitted or you will be able to submit them once we have the Google form on Discord. I don't know whether it's been posted yet but it should appear somewhere in here in the announcements. So this is the announcement channel where you can then get to know about things that we want to announce to everyone. The way that works is that you go to a Google Sheet, you sign up very much like for the in-person event where you just put your name, you put the title and then we have a number of slots available and then after all the slots are filled it's filled and then you can try again next day. The session is later today. Next question, do you have some live tools providing help to disabled people in subtitled sign language? Unfortunately, we don't have any additional tools available to help disabled people like subtitles or sign language. There are some things that we could use on YouTube. I think YouTube can enable subtitles but only after the talks have actually been processed by YouTube. I don't know how good they are, the subtitles. We have not tried to get this working with Zoom. They added this feature in the last few months but I don't know how well it works so we decided to not try it out, not have it working. Any other questions? There's a question here for the poster Zoom sessions. Are these sort of drop-in when you can and interact with the poster presenter? The poster sessions are scheduled so we will have the poster speaker available in those slots and then you can just go into that Zoom session and then you can ask the speaker anything about their poster. The posters are available on the website and you have a preview that you can have a look at if you click on the preview image you get a PDF file and then of course you can look at the PDF and then you can ask questions to the speaker that's available in that Zoom session. It will also be possible to ask additional questions after that session is ended by simply going to the appropriate breakout room that we have for the posters. You can find a category on Discord for this and you can ask additional questions there and we ask all the poster presenters to also be there. Also, all the people having a talk we also ask them to be available in those chats so that they can answer additional questions. Another question, what will the virtual social event look like? That's actually a very good question. We don't know ourselves. We're just going to open up things and invite all of you to the session and then we will see how it goes. We have planned a few games that we will run. We also have some music to play that was contributed. If you want to play music, then you're more than welcome. Just let us know, we can set that up. We can also have breakout rooms where you can then maybe play board games or you can show off things that you want to maybe show off. We can also do virtual reality room things. This is a bit up to you of what you want to do at the social event. Any other questions? It says here that someone didn't have to enter the ID and password for the Zoom webinar. You just had to enter the name and email. That is correct. If you click on the link, the link actually has the ID and the password built in and this is also why we ask you not to share those links outside. Once you click on the link, you can immediately join. Another question, seats for the sprints limited? Actually, no, they're not limited. It's the only challenge that we have or maybe it's not a challenge, we don't know yet. Last I looked, we have 13 sprint teams who set up the sprint on the sprint page that we have. The challenge that we have is that we need to assign all the sprinters that we have to those teams and we have way more sprinters than we have sprint teams. If you have some idea to hold additional sprints, then please head over to the sprints page and register your sprint there. Please also let the organizers know so that they can set up a sprint channel for you on Discord. Then we can have more teams. We have plenty of space available. We have plenty of these zoom licenses that we are going to use for having zoom rooms associated with the sprint teams. The sprint teams don't have to use Zoom. They can also use Discord audio channels for that. We can scale up to quite a number of these teams. Let me just check with my room manager. I'm just going to mute for a second. What you just saw is me unmuting in Discord and then talking to my room manager. That's how we operate. I have a few minutes left that I can fill with answering and additional questions. Let me just have a look at if there is anything else. Let me just scroll down a bit. Is it possible to bookmark the channels in Discord in order to find them quickly? That's actually a question I cannot answer because I'm not familiar enough with Discord to be able to answer that. You can ask Jason, though, one of the organizers. He's the expert for Discord and perhaps he has an answer to that one. Another question is a bit disappointing for that even few days before some stuff in the merge shop has been unavailable. I'm pretty sure that the merge shop will fill up the extra t-shirts again, but because everything is run by Spreadshirt, we don't have any influence on that one. I'm sorry about that. You just have to try again maybe in a few days or maybe next week. Another question. The first talk, 30 Golden Rules of Deep Learning Performance will be in this Zoom session. Yes. We're going to have a short break after what was supposed to be the keynote, what I just filled with the Q&A for Discord. And we're going to head on and continue with the regular schedule. Okay, I think we've gone through most of the questions. Thank you very much again for joining the conference and I hope you're going to have a great time. I'm going to stop the screen sharing now and then we will have the break. You can mingle in the hallway on Discord and then we will see each other again for the next session here on the webinar, the 30... What was the talk title again? I forgot the next talk. And then let's proceed like that. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.