 This talk is about introducing how we run EuroPython 2021. Hopefully, at least. The presentation is about running the in-person conference. It is not about the online conference. Of course, we now know how to run online conferences, and we would be able to do that as well. Let's hope for the best, and then let's see that we can actually run this in-person again in Dublin. A bit about the EPS, the EuroPython Society. This is the organisation behind the EuroPython conference. It was founded in 2002 in Goetheburg in Sweden, when we had the conference there. Since it has been providing the legal framework for everything, it protects the trademarks, to make sure that we can enter contracts and so on. Initially, it was just basically deciding or helping with the decision process for the EuroPython location, and local teams essentially ran the whole conference. This changed since 2014. Since then, we basically took a more active role, and since 2015, we started working with on-site teams, and then in 2017 we basically switched to a completely remote setup, meaning that the whole conference is more or less organised by people around Europe, or even worldwide. We do have people from like Camilla, for example, from Brazil. We have lots of people joining. We have Nova Chen, for example, coming all the way from Taiwan to help us at the conference. It's really fun, and we've built a good team around all of this. We found that we don't really need the on-site team anymore. We do appreciate having help on-site, but we don't rely on that anymore. This is mostly for financial reasons, and for organisational risk reasons, because of course the EPS takes a lot of risk in running the conference. The typical in-person conference has a budget of around €600,000, so we move €600,000 around every single year. If something fails, then this would cost us a lot and probably have the EPS go bankrupt, so we have to be a bit careful about these things. I already talked about what the purpose is of the EPS, so I'm going to skip this slide. The model that we've decided to use is a decentralized workgroup model, so we have different tasks that we have at the conference. We have different workgroups. These workgroups basically stay in place for every single year, so we don't switch them in and out like we did before when we had the on-site teams take care of these things and the local teams. The major advantage of that is that we don't have this much loss of institutional knowledge. If you run a conference, of course, you gain a lot of experience when doing that, and you can reuse that knowledge of next year. With the constant switching that we had of groups organising the conference, we always lost all that knowledge. Every single year, basically the group had to relearn everything or at least adjust again to the size of the European Conference compared to the local event. The EPS takes the financial risk, it enters the contracts, it's liable for everything, and we also deal with the taxes. The structure that we have is that we have a board. It's currently six members. It was eight members when we started this year's term. We usually have around eight or maybe ten members. Six members is not really big enough. Then we have the workgroups, and of course we have the EPS members. The EPS members get to vote on the setup of the board. The board members get voted in by the members. The members also have to release the liability of the board members at the General Assembly. The General Assembly is usually run at the European Event, but this year, because we have it online, we decided to not have it at the conference because it was simply too much work to prepare everything. We're going to have the General Assembly after the conference, probably a few weeks afterwards. We're going to send the invites out for that. If you want to become a member, that's easily possible. It doesn't cost anything. You just go to our website and apply for membership. You just have to write why you would like to be a member. The board has to vote you in, and once the board has voted you in, you have voting rights, and then you can vote at the General Assembly. We also consider the European attendees members of the EPS, even though they are not officially, so of course we listen to the European attendees. We always try to get feedback from them, try to improve things from year to year. We organize everything in Google Docs and basically maintain all this knowledge in there and take the feedback into account for managing the next years. This is a short overview of the conference development. We've been doing this, Europe-Python has been organized, not the EPS has organized everything, but Europe-Python itself has been organized for many, many years. Now it's the 19th edition. We have a meeting with Charles Le Wa in Belgium, which is interesting. I was one of the Executive Committee members as well in that year. We start with 250 people. It doesn't sound like a lot, but we had Guido there, we had a lot of core developers there. It was really nice. We had sandwiches for lunch, so we started small. That was fun. Every single year, or every second year or every third year, we switched to a different city. Now that we have this remote setup, we switch every single year because we can move around in Europe. That's the point of switching. You can see the development here. It's always around 1,100, 1,200. It was 1,400 in Berlin. This is a good size. We don't really want to grow much beyond that. This is a short overview of the timeline. The reason I'm presenting this is because the talk is about finding people who would like to participate in the organization so that you get to know when we will need a lot of help. I'm presenting this timeline. The way it works is that we always run an RFP. RFP means the request for proposal. This is a commercial process that is usually run by larger companies when they have to buy something. They ask a lot of vendors to send out the specifics of what they're looking for and then the vendors have to provide an offer back to them. It's a standardized process. Everyone knows how it works in the commercial industry. Especially the venues know how this works. They are very used to this kind of approach. That makes things a lot easier for us. What we do is we send out a large questionnaire which has all the details or asks for all the details that we need. We provide all the information about the size of the conference, how many days we need, what kinds of tooling we need, the size of the rooms and all these things. Then we get answers back from them. It's a two-phase process, two rounds. The reason why we do two rounds is because we want to have the venues compete against each other so that we get better prices from the venues. This has worked out really well. The first round is always open for everyone. The second round is just three candidates and then they have to submit a second bid, usually lower than the first one. After we have then decided the location based on which venue we choose, we then go into contact with potential local teams that might be there. Something that we have to do as a European conference is we have to be very attentive to national conferences that already exist in the countries. We don't want to step on anyone's toes, so we always try to have the conference not as a competitor to the national conference. We try to play well because there is no point in having Europe compete with the national conference. This whole process kicks off in August and September, ideally of course. In reality it's always a bit later, but this is just the ideal timeline. Then in October we finish it. We can then set up everything. We have to find accountants for doing things. We have to register for VAT taxes. Usually the accountants help us with that. We have to figure out how to tax for the tickets, how to tax for the sponsor invoices, all these things. All of this is essentially done by the board members and the accountants. This is not something where volunteers help. Once we have decided, then we can start with ramping up the initial work. For example, what typically happens is that the web workgroup already starts working towards improving the website. Every single year we find something that doesn't really work as we would like it to work. We have some requests there. These requests are then implemented in a timeframe or in sprints. In December we typically have the pre-launch website started. This is essentially a marketing website. It just has basic information, like the location, the time, and so on. We launched that before actually signing the contract with the venue, usually, because the venue contract negotiations start after we have made the decision. This contract negotiation typically lasts for two months. What we usually do is in January we then sign the contract with the venue. We then launch the website, the main one usually end of January. In February we start the CFP, which is managed by the program workgroup. Then we have the start of the ticket sales by the web workgroup. In March we start the sponsor signups by the sponsors workgroup and the sponsor brochures created by the marketing design workgroup. Actually, the marketing design workgroup doesn't really do much in this. It just manages the whole process and does reviews. The actual brochure itself is created by our designer, Jessica. In April, after the CFP, we can then hopefully publish the schedule or at least what we typically do is we first publish the session list and then take the session list as basis for creating the schedule. This is done by the program workgroup. As you can see, from February to April to May, that's very intense for the program workgroup. The sponsor workgroup starts working here and this usually becomes... it's a slow start usually and then closer to the conference it gets very intense for the sponsors workgroup because sponsors typically need a lot of help. There are hundreds of emails going back and forth to get everything signed up. We have to then register with their vendor systems and so on, get the invoices sorted and all that stuff. All that is being done by the sponsors workgroup and then after the schedule is published we can then also tell the designer how the schedule will look so that we can get a conference booklet. It usually takes a bit to finish and then in June we order all the material, the branding and stuff so lots of orders going out to t-shirt vendors, to Amazon a lot, to local vendors that we have. We need to figure out where to get the badges. All these things are done by the marketing design workgroup and then in July it's typically the conference. If you have any questions, by the way, then please put them into the Q&A session there. Otherwise we can also chat in the talk chat later on. This is how a typical workgroup structure looks like. We usually have one or more chair persons in the workgroups. The chair persons are essentially accountable for what the workgroup needs to do. Accountable in that case means that if your workgroup doesn't deliver, then essentially you have to deliver. Like I said, in the timeline we need certain things done in certain timeframes and we cannot really wait a lot. This is why we have these chair persons in place and then we have the workgroup members. Of course, all work towards those goals, but sometimes this happens that we have signed up workgroup members who become inactive or who don't really start to be active and so then we have to remove those. It's always a risk and this is something that needs to be managed by the chair persons. The workgroups that we have are these on two pages. Administration, this is not really a workgroup. It's actually handled by the EPS Board, the finance is also going to be done by the EPS Treasurer mostly as the chair of course, but we can also have helpers in here. This is mostly about collecting invoices, making sure that everything is properly put into the budget, into the ledger and so on so that we have control over what we're spending and where we're spending it, what the risk is and where we have to monitor ticket sales and all these things. That's done in the finance workgroup. Sponsors, like I mentioned, has to do all the contact with the in communication with the sponsors, so that's a lot of emails, a lot of back and forth. It's also doing a conference call sometimes to get sponsors on board and explain things to them. The communications workgroup could actually need a few more people. This is the workgroup that's responsible for all the outside communications, post, managing Twitter, posting things on Telegram, making sure that everything is well under... that the information that we generate, all the things that we need to communicate are properly communicated to the community. Support is the workgroup that is managing the helpdesk, so if you write to helpdesk.eu, this is the support workgroup that's working on that one. They, in general, for the in-person conference, also take care of the helpdesk, the registration desk part of the conference to organize everything there and also take care of managing the on-site volunteers. For the in-person conference, unlike for the online conference, where it's not really possible to have on-site volunteers, we usually have quite a few on-site volunteers who just sign up at the conference for doing things. They get t-shirts as a small perk or recognition. They get on stage afterwards so that they get in the closing session. It's usually a lot of fun for the in-person event, so this is usually something that people really enjoy doing, even though it takes away some of their conference experience and time in terms of watching talks, but it's very fulfilling, I guess, for them, just as it is for us running the conference and they get a bit of a feeling of what we are doing on a smaller scale there. So we have those, and the support workgroup also manages those. Then we have financial aid. This is for the financial aid program that we're running for the in-person conference. For the online conference, we didn't have enough resources to do this. So not enough people to actually manage it, so we decided not to do it. Marketing design, as I said, is responsible for the booklets, the logo, the pre-launch website, and so on. Program workgroup does the CFP selection of talks, managing the schedule, managing all the interactions with speakers. So let's say a speaker wants to do the talk at a different time, then that kind of discussion needs to be done by the program workgroup. The web workgroup manages the development of the website and things like setup of the VMs and stuff, that kind of thing. So it's a standard web development, essentially. The media team doesn't really have to do a lot for the in-person conference because we usually hire a recording company, and so the media workgroup doesn't really have to do a lot. It just manages the relationships with the media company that we hire. This is, of course, a lot different for the online event, where we have to basically run everything ourselves. And so this year, the media workgroup is actually the largest workgroup that we have. And then finally, we have the Code of Conduct workgroup, which is for people. It's managed in a different way. We always have two females in there. It's a small team of people, and getting in and out of that group is, well, getting out is easy, but getting in is not so easy because, of course, those people have to deal with sometimes with difficult to handle issues, and we need to work well as a team together. So this is where we are looking for more help, just to give you an idea of how we work. Most of the work nowadays is done on Telegram. We also have a mailing list, of course. We manage everything, all the content, all the documentation on Google Docs and management worksheets that we have there. Like I said, the chairs are responsible. So that's all I wanted to say. I do see a couple of questions here. I don't really know how much time I have, so let me see. Okay, 45, so 10 minutes I have. Right, so I have the first question here. Which workgroup are most in need of help? So most in need of help, let me go back here. The program workgroup would need some more help. The web workgroup needs more help because we lost a couple of people who were very active in that group. Then we would need people in communications. I'm managing Twitter, for example, I'm managing all the other communication outlets that we have, writing blog posts, that kind of thing. We need more people in support, but for that support is mostly needed closer to the conference. So just in a few months before the conference and at the conference, especially, we need people there. Financial aid, we could use more people. So maybe sponsors as well. Yeah, but not many really people. Maybe like one, two more people would be nice. The second question is, are you going to share the slides? Yes, of course. We always put the slides up online. On the website, I can show you where we put them, just a second. So if you go here to our website, this is the blog, this is not what I wanted to show. So you go here to the EuroPython Society. This is the Society website, this is also a blog. And then if you go here and you go to the EuroPython Conferences, then you get all the listing of all the information that's available for the different conferences going back to the first year. And we always put links in here to everything, all the resources specifically to this talk. We put that into the records, I think, right here. So you go to the records and then we have the EuroPython Society presentations here. And you can see all the different slide decks here. We're going to put the 2021 presentation here as well and also the video once it's cut.