 Okay, so the next talk is going to be by me. Right, so for the introduction, I'm Mark Lamberg. I'm the chair of the Europython Society, and I've been doing this for five years, and I'm now going to present how we run Europython and what we will need to do to prepare for next year's conference, which will hopefully be in Dublin in July. So, right, there's the share. We've scheduled the conference for July 11th to 17th next year, so in summer again, like we usually do. Europython typically happens in July. And I wrote plan because, right, so we still have covered around, and it's not really clear what the situation will be in July next year. There might be some things that would get in our way, so we might have to do it online again, which we would really like to avoid, but that's how it is. Hopefully it will happen in Dublin, and let's be positive, let's just assume it will be in Dublin. Let me just go over how everything works. Right, so the organization behind Europython is the Europython Society and the abbreviation is EPS for that, so that's what you're going to see a lot in the talk. The EPS was founded in 2004 to run Europython to provide a legal background, a legal framework to enter contracts and so on. For Europython it was founded in Göteborg. Initially it just managed the selection process for Europython, so it didn't really enter contracts for Europython, but just managed selecting local teams that then run the Europython event. And that has worked for a couple of years while Europython was still smaller, but then over the years Europython grew so much that the financial risk being taken on by the local organizations was just too much to handle, so we had to basically take over that part and now we run Europython as it's signed off by the Europython Society and it's also financially backed by the Europython Society. At first we continued to work with local organizers in 2017 that basically stopped in a fully remote working mode. So it's easy for you to join us to help us and to participate in organizing Europython. So what's the purpose of the EPS? Well, first of all, of course, running the Europython conference series. Then some years ago we extended the scope, so we added the additional scope to provide support for the European Python community. So what we do is we provide conference grants and project grants to other conferences in Europe. So our scope is specifically the geographic Europe. So if you have a conference, if you have a project that you want to run, you need some funding, then please approach us. You can write to grants at europython.eu or go to our website to the resources and then you find the links there and also how to apply. The other part that we do is we protect the IP in Europython so we have trademarks on the term Europython on the logos and of course we maintain the social accounts for Europython. Now how does the EPS work? Like I mentioned, we now have a fully remote and decentralized work model. We've set up a number of work groups where people can then join and then work on a particular part of the conference organization. The advantage of having these work groups is that we no longer lose as much institutional knowledge when people step in or step out of the organization. So usually we have quite a few people who stay on from one year to the next and then the knowledge can easily be passed on. In the past we always had the issue that every local organization, for example, they had to basically rebuild this institutional knowledge and that was a major source of problems. So the EPS also takes the financial risk on everything, enters contracts, maintains the sponsor relationships across the years which makes getting sponsors a lot easier and we also deal with taxes, usually using a local accountant that we get, for example in Dublin. In terms of financial risk to give you an idea, the budget that we are maintaining for an in-person conference is around 600 to 650,000 euros. That's a lot of money and we have to properly handle everything. So it's actually a larger undertaking to make sure that the money is used correctly and that we don't lose money. The EPS structure, the organizational structure is also very simple. We have a board of up to nine members and it's an active board so the board members are usually the most active people working in the organization of the conference and then we have a number of work groups that I'm going to get to in the next couple of slides. Plus, of course, we have the members. Anyone can sign up as a member. The members have to be voted in by the board and then when you have the EPS membership then you can also participate in the General Assembly that we're going to have later this year to vote in the new board. And to some extent, we also include the European attendees into our organization so we listen to them a lot and we pay attention to what the attendees want. So a short overview of how the conference developed. It all started in 2002 in Charleroi in Belgium. There we had 240 people. That was the very first Europyson. It was a lot of work. We had lots of discussions. But it was also a lot of fun. We had sandwiches for lunch, for example, and just water bottles that was our lunch. It's not like catering that you get nowadays. We had lots of famous people there. We had Guido there. We had Eric Raymond there. So that was nice. And then over the years, of course, we moved around in Europe because it's the Europyson. So we move around to different places in Europe. 2017 was in Rimini. We had Edinburgh, Scotland. We had Basel in Switzerland. And this year and last year were online. As you can see from the development of the attendee counts, it's been going up to around 1,200 people. And it kind of stays at 1,200 people. This year we added this view only ticket and that gave us around 900 to about 1,000 extra tickets that we sold. So we're now at around 2,100 tickets. But whether you count those view only tickets as attendees or not is basically a viewpoint thing. So these are the actual numbers that we have for conference tickets who actually attend the conference and participate directly in it. Here's a typical timeline of how the organization works. So what we are doing every year is we have an RFP process, a request for proposal process, which is a commercial process. This is what you do when you ask vendors to send in proposals. What we do is we send out these RFPs to conference venues and then with a long list of questions and then we expect them to come back with a long list of answers for us. And then we do two rounds. We filter out the most interesting candidates and then we select one of those. This happens, it starts in September and then it continues into October and November. And then in the second round we also contact local teams. Let's say we do a conference in Ireland like what we planned for 2020. We would then, when it becomes clear that Ireland is one of the hosting places, then we contact the Irish local team there to make sure that there are no conflicts with the natural conferences, right? Because we have lots of PICONs in Europe and so we don't want to step on anyone's toes so we contact them to make sure everything is okay. And then we do the final selection. In December we then announce, usually announce the result of the RFP and the selection of the venue and we then also announce the most likely time. In January we have to finalize everything so we have to sign the agreements, the contracts, we launched the pre-launch website which basically has the initial information and then we set up everything to make everything work. We have to have a local accountant, we have to register for VAT, we have to get the taxes working and the accounting. So that's done in January. In February we typically then launched the website. This is done by the web work group. We decide the budget and the ticket prices on the board and in March we start the CFP done by the program work group and we also usually start the ticket sales and this is managed by the web work group based on the prices that we decided in February. In March-April we run the sponsors sign-ups and we create the sponsor brochure. This is done by the sponsors work group and the brochure like everything else that has to do with marketing design is being done by the marketing design work group. And then in April-May the program work group then has lots of work because they have to look at all the selections in the CFP. They have to run the talk voting that we always do which is something special for Europe, so the attendees that we have that people who have already bought a ticket they can actually submit their votes on the talks that were submitted and then we use that as a basis to select the talks and then build the schedule. At that point the marketing design group starts working on the conference booklet once the schedule is done because that's the main part of the conference booklet. Plus we start the fin-aid process. So the fin-aid work group takes care of going through all the applications for fin-aid and then selects the ones that get the fin-aid. In June we have to then order material and take care of all the branding stuff done by the marketing design work group. The help desk has to be managed by the support work group so that's when we get... Well actually we start getting requests to the help desk earlier actually as soon as the ticket sale starts but the main kind of period when things start for the support work group is before the conference. And then we have to take care of logistics. So for example getting our conference gear to the conference site the venue we have to set up the logistics company that will then help us locally at the conference venue location with accepting parcels from sponsors from things that we order. So that's a bit of overhead. This is usually done by board members not by a specific work group and then in July of course we have the conference. And during the conference we have a registration desk that's managed by the support work group. This is like the on-site help desk that we have. Of course they also have to continue working on the help desk application that we have on the website. The sponsors work group will then have to take care of the sponsor handling so making sure that the sponsors all feel welcome and feel sought out all the issues that we sometimes have like for example parcels missing or parcels being delayed for some reason we often have customs issues that we have to resolve that kind of thing. And then of course we have the code of conduct work group which then takes care of any conduct issues that we may have at the conference. Something that happens basically throughout the year is communications. So posting to Twitter to all the social channels that we have and that's being done by the communication work group. So that's a quick overview of the timeline that we have. Now let's have a look at how the work groups work. So the work groups are usually structured again in a very simple way. We have one or two work group chairs and we typically have at least one of those be a board member. The reason there is that we have to have a very good connection between the work groups and the board so that the information flow is not hindered by for example having someone not being on the board and then not knowing about things that we decided on the board and then maybe we forget to communicate to the work groups. So that's very important. And then we have the work group members who basically just in each work group then help with the work that needs to be done. The workload in the work groups usually depends a lot on the timeline. It depends a lot on where you... in which area you work. Sometimes you have lots of work to do before the conference. Sometimes you have lots of work at the conference or just before the conference. Depends a bit on how things go. One word about inactive members. Inactive members are people who've signed up but don't actually do anything in the work groups. We remove them from the work groups because we don't want to give the impression that we have enough work group members whereas in reality we don't have enough active members. So these are the work groups that we have. We used to have administration and finance but we folded those back into the EPS board because those two things are actually mostly done by the board anyway. We have a sponsors work group that takes care of all the interaction with the sponsors. Communications work group does all the communication sends out emails, does the sponsor emails for example during the conference as well, works on telegram, makes sure that everyone knows about everything. So that's communications. The support work group deals with all the help desk related things, the registration desk, everything that has to do with helping attendees find their way to the conference and then navigate at the conference. We have a financial aid work group that manages the financial aid budget which is quite sizeable usually at the conference. So it's something like between 10,000 to 20,000 euros that we usually have as a budget. Marketing design is everything that has to do with graphics. However, there's one important thing there. We don't design things ourselves. So what we do is we always hire a designer and we have very good relationship with the designer from Spain and we always work with her to basically get all the logos designed and selecting background images and things like that. So marketing design basically just takes care of making sure that everything is in place and we then sometimes take the designs that the designers created and then we create things like for example, the slide that you see here, the slide background which is created by the marketing design work group. Program does everything that has to do with selecting talks and also does everything that has to do with making sure that the speakers feel at home and answer any questions that they might have and do last minute changes to the schedule and so on. Everything website. So the website is hosted on root servers that we have at Hetzner and we use Docker for running them and the website is written in Django. So the web work group typically takes care of doing things like Django upgrades, adding new features, making changes. Maybe for next year we will have a new layout then the web work group would work with the company which basically helps us then to create a new layout and so on. So all of these things are web related and then we have the media work group. Media is at these online events is very important because we have lots of work to do with the, you know, getting things recorded, getting things online. You know, like select the stream yard thing for example is done by the media work group. At the conference itself this is mostly about the video recording and making sure that happens. But we might run next year as a hybrid event so that you can join online as well in addition to in person and so in that case the media work group would have lots of, lots to do as well. Finally we have the conduct work group. This is closely integrated with the EPS board because when we're at the event we sometimes need to, you know, run quick decisions and so that can only, the quick decisions can only be done by board members because they are responsible and so we always need to have board members in the conduct work group. Right, so how does it work? How do we work together? We have pretty much standardized on telegram groups so we have quite a few telegram groups that we use for this. We do have a couple of mailing lists as well and then as the basically the main work, let's say environment that we use for storing all the data, storing all the text documents, images and so on. We use Google Docs, Google Sheets and Google Drive for this a lot and I didn't put that on the slide but I should have. We also have a project management system that we're using, it's called ClickUp. Yeah, and one final word. The chairs are responsible and accountable for what the work groups have to do so if something does not get done then ultimately the chairs will have to then step in and do the work. Right, so that's the end of my presentation. So now I'm going to have to hop over to the chat and see whether there are any questions. I don't see any questions which is interesting. Is anyone listening? I don't know. Is anyone listening to this talk? Okay, so the question is how do I sign up as a volunteer? Let me... I have to do multitasking now so I have to be the speaker and the presenter at the same time. So how do I sign up as a volunteer? So that's actually very easy. I can show you you how to go to the web page and open it in your private society. Right, and let's move it over here. So this is the your private society page. Let me just check whether you can see that. And then over here you go to the resources page up here and then this has lots of information. Let me see this is just the page. This got oops, this got redone a while ago. So I have some trouble finally getting myself interesting. We should fix that. Anyway, the easiest way to contact us is you just go here to about society. You scroll down to the email address which is supposed to be on this page but it isn't. Oh my goodness. What is this? It's the email address is board at europeisen.eu so I could write it into the board at europeisen.eu so that's the email address and then if you just right there then the board will get the message and then we can help you and sign you up. Next year again is we had quite a few sessions where we invited people to online conferences to online meetings and then we basically walked them through the same kind of slide deck that we have that I just presented and then they can ask questions. So we're going to announce these things on our blog so you just go to europeisen society and then we'll announce it here and then you can sign up to those meetings and we will then take note of your name and your contact details and then we can sign you up to that. Right, let me see. Anything else? In which areas are you looking for help? Very good question. So let me go back to the to the slide with the work groups so I marked all the ones where we need help, I marked them in red. So we need sponsors, we need more communications, we need more people support, we would be nice to have more people think financial aid, we're pretty much covered marketing design same thing, we don't need a lot of people but of course we always like to have some. Program we need more people because we ideally want to do this redesign for next year web, we need more people because we want to do the redesign of the website next year program always needs more people because it's a lot of work to do all the hand holding for the speakers and it's also a lot of work to select the talks themselves. Then depending on how we do media next year if we do hybrids then we will need more people here as well, I should have marked this in blue. Conduct we, it's a very small team of extra people there and that's it, so let me hop back again. I have the same question, thank you for your talk, can I sign up as a volunteer even if the conference is being held in person next year, I live in Brazil. So a very good question, yes of course you can because the thing is that we are running this as the whole organization as an virtually, right, so there's a lot of work let me just hide this and put this up here there's a lot of work that can be done online and then of course you can attend the conference as well and we very much appreciate if you'd help us before the conference, like I mentioned in the timeline the conference organization starts around January so that would be like a perfect time to to join the organization so let's see more questions is there a work group which usually lacks volunteers I already covered that one will there be something like an attendee voting on the context shown at yes so this is a good question as well, let me put that one up so this is this attendee voting, this is actually what we call a talk voting and the talk voting is something that you see on our website you see over here, you go to program and you go all the way down here to talk voting so after the call for proposals we then open the talk voting and you can kind of see it at the moment because it's closed but talk voting basically allows you to vote for everything that has been submitted and probably the next question is who can participate anyone who has a conference ticket already bought for the for the conference coming up so for EP 2022 can participate but also all the previous attendees can also vote so this is a pretty democratic process and then we use the talk voting as the basis for selecting the talk so usually about two thirds of the talks get selected just based on the talk voting and then the rest is then selected by the program workgroup on other criteria like diversity including topics which are not as mainstream but should still get a chance and these things so that's how it works right how many active people organized did organize EuroPython so so we had active people we had just over 20 for this year's conference so not a whole lot but it worked decently well I must say I mean we have an excellent team we have lots of people doing lots of work and because of that we can actually pull this off with this small number of people that we have I must also say that the online events are actually more work intense than the in-person events because for the in-person events we can get lots of external help you know we can just sign up with companies to do a certain things for us but that's not easily possible with the online event because the task that you have to do is sometimes so special you spent more time explaining those tasks than actually doing them yourself so it's something that doesn't work that well for the online events something that has worked really well this year is we got a company the company that does the video recording for us usually we brought them in to help us with the managing the stream yard so that has worked really well and that's definitely going to be something that we're going to do next year as well so let me just check how much time I have left so I have another few minutes so let's see more questions what sort of contribution are you looking for hours per week again very good question this again depends a bit on the workgroup that you're working in so let's say if you do FinAID for example FinAID just has a few weeks where FinAID is being done so in those few weeks you will have to invest I don't know maybe three hours every week to do the review process and of course you know help with the setup and so on a bit so maybe one week is a bit more work other workgroups like the communications workgroup that requires more work because you have to do quite a bit of publishing of information so that closer to the conference is definitely around like maybe four hours a week if you do things like sponsors workgroup that's a lot of work before the conference the weeks before the conference and at the conference so that's very intense and likewise with some of the others like support for example it requires more work during the event for the in-person event of course you would be at the conference right so you can help there so what we typically have is we have session shares at the in-person event who then take over the session share part and you can sign up for those things right before the conference so now I'm out of time thank you very much for all these questions if you have more questions then please just reach out to us you can reach us in the info desk and now I'll take this off stage and we get to the next talk