Okay, sorry for starting late. We had some last-minute changes to do on the slide set. Plus also have dinner very late, lunch very late. So Fabio and I are going to present you how we run your Python. Because for next year, we're gonna

have a switch in location again. We're gonna move away from from Bilbao, unfortunately. Because it's been really great here. And of course we need my help for that. And if you're interested in helping, then maybe we have something here for you. So let's just give a short introduction about what the EPS does in this. EPS is an organization behind EuroPython.

It was founded in 2004 in Gothenburg in Sweden to provide like the legal backup. Like the PSF, for example, we have the trademark of EuroPython. The intention is that we also provide some financial support for the for the organizers.

And we've also run the selection process for the location a couple of times. And since 2014, we started actually actively working with the local teams to make everything happen. And in 2015, we added some extras, which I'm going to talk about in the next slide.

So firstly, the first period of the EPS was basically just providing these things like trademarks, logos, selection of the location. And then in 2015, we decided to basically reset the whole EPS and completely change the organizational model to a workgroup based model. And this has turned out to be really working well.

So we now have quite a few workgroups to work with. The main reason for doing this was to reduce the loss of institutional knowledge that we had each time we changed locations. So previously, the onsite team did everything. And every time we changed location, the new onsite team had to relearn everything and redo everything.

Which also, for example, meant that we had a new website system for each and every location. And we're moving away from that. So we have one website system that we use. We have these workgroups that continue to work throughout the years.

All the knowledge is kept in those workgroups and it's really working out. So this is how we're working now. So the EPS structure now looks like this. You have a board with board, meaning that it's basically the most active members working on the EuroPython organization.

Then you have workgroups that help with all the different parts of the organization. And then of course you have the EPS members. And we're going to have the General Assembly right after this session where we are going to report to the members what we did last year. And of course you have the EuroPython attendees and all the attendees are welcome to join the EPS because we think that you should have a say in how

everything works out. So I'm going to pass over to Fabio now. So just a quick timeline about this year's organization, which was

definitely different from last year. In November 2015 we launched a preview site. And in January we started real active work in the EuroPython groups. We still worked before but the real work started there. In February we launched the website, all the tickets, the early words, the call for proposals.

March we had the regular ticket sales and tall quoting. We started the financial aid program in April and we also did the schedule online around that date.

We actually did a new thing this year to help last time proposals or proposals for hot topics. So in June we did a second call for paper. And in July we basically switched the on-desk rates and the last minute nice thing was the conference app online.

We actually had a big great feedback about the app online. Of course we all know that July 17th we started the conference and today we're having a general assembly.

So the conference organization, the hard work took six months but honestly it's more than that. Every second year is easier, a lot, because you already know a lot of things that

it's hard to predict regarding venues, regarding communications, regarding people that can show up or not, financial, small things. So this year we were more much more aware of the things and actually we made some adjustments based on last year feedback.

People still complain anyway for stuff, that's how it is. So small like advice for volunteers or people that are organizing their conferences or doing community. Always take the positive part

and try to improve the negative feedbacks. It's always good to have negative feedbacks but never put yourself down really because in every community if you have issues and people are not good with it, you should really invite everyone to join and make a

better community as they would like. So that's the same thing we try to do here. This year we added the Telegram communication hub, that was a really good thing and helped a lot both organizers and the communication between attendees, volunteers and everyone.

So some history and some development regarding the evolution. First conference was in Belgium, a fairly good number, 240. Then we have some, I don't think we have reliable data for

those years, but we did have an EuroPython in Switzerland and Vilnius. We had two in Gothenburg, we had two in Birmingham, we had one at CERN and in

we had three in Florence, exactly. Yeah, the evolution before was as much, there was a big evolution between UK and Italy and that's where probably the number of

attendees require a much more structured, a much more planned organization. This year we paired basically the last year number of attendees, which is probably very good still.

It's probably due to DjangoCon being in the US this week as well, so lots of Django developers probably went over to the US instead of coming here as they usually do. And Sci-fi was last week as well, so a lot of people from the data science community were there.

So the work groups, we already talked about them last year, but it's really good to repeat and also because they are working quite better. The work groups have one chairperson,

sometimes two, and the working groups member, it's mostly driven by who's more active, who's helping more. In some cases it's not the case and we try to talk and make natural roles

when it's necessary, but it's always necessary to have a contact point to talk between work groups. And work groups have voting and no voting members, so usually decisions that are not

can be taken quickly and are not so important. The small technical things are just taken, others we have a vote. We have quite a few teams, there are conference administration, finance, sponsors,

communications support, financial aid, marketing and design, the program work group, web media team, the code of conduct, and the on-site team, which is more or less a glue between those.

And of course it's the team that needs to be in contact with the venue doing the work locally and taking care of the details. Okay, so Fabio left the last slide for me. So we also have

something called the guidelines, which was an idea that was part of this move to the work group, so we wanted to start to document how we actually run the conference. We started working on this document, we've not really done much work on it recently, we should probably after this conference

to have something like a document that lets new people that come into the organization better start off in the organization, so they have a better idea of what they're signing up for and how everything works. So right now basically we have the wiki that we use

internally where we document stuff, and we have lots of chat logs of course. Now in Intelligram we have the mailing list and we have the mailing list archives. So the organization is basically centered around the mailing lists for more things that don't need to be done right away,

and then for things that are more urgent we use the the Telegram groups, which has worked out really well. So that was the last slide. Let me just show you how our Telegram groups thing looks like. Let me just move this over here.

Yeah, I'm just gonna apply this filter here, so you can just see the Europies and stuff. I don't know whether I can make it any larger than this. So you can see here,

this is the volunteers group for example. This is how the people volunteering here at the conference do, how they communicate with each other, which is really convenient, because you can just

write here, you don't have to phone anyone or anything. We do have these walkie-talkies outside there, but I don't think they used us this year, because we're basically doing everything here. Then you have the public one. I have no idea what this is. This is the public one. This is one where anyone can sign up. This is something that

we have to monitor a bit, because sometimes we have messages that don't belong there, and so you need to do a bit of moderation. This is our board list. There's nothing special here. I mean, we just had a board meeting for example, so we voted in a few more people.

This is the support one. Anyway, this is just the search filter. See, we have a few more. We have a simple one for all the organizers, which is the plaza one.

We're using that to just directly send messages to everyone in the organization. Yeah, and that's how it works. Using Telegram is great fun as well. You can send stickers, photos, and yeah, this has been really good.

Right, so now is question and answer time. Do you have any questions? Yes.

Right. The way that it works is that you basically write an email to the board.

We then contact the chairs of that particular work group that you want to work in, ask them whether they have a need for more people, which we usually always do, and then we just sign you up for it. There's one thing that we found in the last year is that we had quite a few people who signed up for these work groups, but they didn't actually

rather, well, it's a lot of work, so it would be better to really consider if you want to actually do work in that work group to only then apply for the work group.

And then, of course, we'd happily sign you up for everything. Right, we have a wiki for this.

We're happy for suggestions how we can manage better, because we have many people just like being there and sometimes doing something, and the problem is some tasks have deadlines, and people tend to tell after the deadline, I didn't make it because, and this is horrible for us, because for us, the chairs, we have to step in on short notice, and we're trying to

find better solutions, also like a way of open communication. If there's a deadline and you don't make it, tell us as soon as you know. It's no problem. I mean, it's all volunteering, and we're trying to build a great conference, so actually we are, I think, like that's what we discussed, we should try a little bit more doing better management as well.

It's not just like a one-side story, because it's not everybody is made just to grab responsibility, and basically working work groups was a lot like this, just, okay, somebody does just do it and see what happens, but it worked out well. One thing I wanted to mention,

like on top of this, there's also some learning curve to be active on the working groups, mostly because it's not just like a small source work group, just don't drop in and send emails randomly and that's that. So this year the work groups were new, we had a quite heavy lifting

raising all the documentation and raising wiki pages and raising stuff, and also checking that sometimes wiki pages are too long or do not work really well, so we're trying to make easier for everyone to join. It's also good to have someone joining and documenting the process

saying what are the things that I missed and why I had to drop the ball, because time is, it's in the same, in both directions, like both from us and new volunteers, so we are trying to do a lot of work to make easier for everyone to enjoy.

So this is the wiki that we're using, so this is the main page of the wiki, we have entries for different conferences, down here we have the milestones, also the actual milestones that we used, and sometimes you can see how we, what we planned and what the final milestone turned out to be. Then we have for each work group, we have a page down here,

so for example if you go to the sponsors one, you then get the various resources that we use

for that group, like a mailing list, various addresses that we use for this, then we have working documents, also usually on Google Drive somewhere, so we're using Google Docs a lot in spreadsheets, and we also try to put extra information here that's being asked by

people, by sponsors in this case, and try to document processes of how we do certain things, for example with the sponsors, there's a sign-up process for the sponsors that we have to follow each and every time, and so we try to document all this here,

and then later on the idea was to take this information, put it into those guideline documents that we wanted to create, so right now we have everything up in here, and then you have the members here, voting members and non-voting members, you also see inactive members, so every now and then we go around and check in the work groups which members are actually active or not, and then the ones that are not active they get converted into this

inactive status, which is a way for us to basically know whether we need to add more people to that work group or not, because sometimes we have a huge roster for a full work group, but in effect only very few people are actually working in that work group,

that's how that works, exactly, right, right, when you start in a work group what we do is sign you up to all the mailing lists that you need to be signed up for, give you the

links to the telegram groups, and then we write an introduction and a welcome message for you, and then we usually expect the chairs of that work group to then take you and then show you the various things that need to be done, and like what Alex just said, we also need to

change the method that we're currently using a bit, because right now the method has been that we kind of expect people to find work themselves, so they look at something, see that this needs work, so I'm just going to sit down and do something. That model works for some people, but it doesn't work for everyone, so we probably need to apply some more management in this area.

I also want to point out that we have improved a lot moving away from emails, and also it's really rewarding, I mean, most of the time, for me, work group, I've been in program work group and communications, you really work with friendly, constructive, respectful people,

once you have all the tools and you know what to do, it's also fun, it's not just like, not that we're only complaining about all the problems, it's also a lot of fun, and especially this is very fun seeing everybody having a good time. And well, for example, for the sponsors work group, since each company has a set of

the same tasks, everyone, they are repeated tasks, I used Asana, I don't know if you're familiar with it, so it's a task control web-based system, and it worked quite well for the sponsors work group, I think, and there we saw some of the people in the sponsors work group

were there and we could assign tasks to different people and remind of what tasks were still to be done. I think it's always really important to do the work somebody else can pick

up if you're on holiday and stuff, so it's not about making oneself like the organization, depending on one person's information. You have already identified in which you need help with respect to this year, for example?

Well, for next year, first we have to see how many of the existing work group members actually want to continue working in that work group, and then of course, I mean, in general, we need help everywhere, because if you look at this year's conference, we've been maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 members who were really active, I mean,

really put in a lot of work, and this is a huge conference, so it's not really enough, and the last weeks before the conference are always really really stressful, because there's so many things to think about, and it would be a lot better to

put that on more shoulders. Closer to the conference, there are a lot more help tickets, probably some of these things could be handled by volunteers or people that

are not really work groups or just backups, if they have access to central information, so that may be an area that we didn't work so much this year. But also building this knowledge base, and mostly communication.

So the question was why we do need to change location every two years,

mostly because it's a tradition, it's good to have it running around Europe, you know, when you centralize in one place, then after three years the team tends to be the same,

and or four years or five years, then you have the same problems we had rebooting everything two years ago, three years ago. We are currently running this CFI, what we call CFI, so a call for interest,

so we're trying to figure out who is interested in maybe submitting a proposal, and that is running until next Friday, and then we're going to enter, we want to look at what the applications we get, and then we're going to work with those people to then work on the CFP. If we just get one proposal, of course it'll make things easier, and we can just then

basically skip the CFP and go directly into then figuring out how exactly we want to run the conference in that new location. And we'll be announcing the proposed the CFI proposals that we received,

we'll be saying the one we received. Right, so I mean basically you have to look at it, I also have to look at it this way, doing a conference like this is a lot of work, and people do get burned out,

and that's also one of the reasons why we change to new locations. Previously we basically did it because we wanted this to be EuroPython, so it should be a European conference that moves around in Europe, and that's of course also one of the reasons why we change locations every now and then.

I don't know, just complementing what you have been said on the volunteer side of the point of view. If you're considering volunteering, it's really not that important where it's gonna be next year, but you can help from anywhere.

I live in Brazil, I helped from there, I did what I could, it was great. There were lots of things to do, we had fun, but I tinker a little bit in your code and learn a little bit too. And wow, it's an opportunity, you have to give some of your free time that you

normally would be just watching TV and stuff or anything, but it's fun, you meet new people, and it was really good for me, it was a great opportunity. Yes, I mean 80% of the work can be done online, that's the conclusion.

If you're in a crazy time zone, it can actually be good too. People do not need to stay awake for midnight or stuff like that,

it could be switched in different time zones.

Less than 20 organizers at all with volunteers, but it was in Python Brazil, it's a conference, we got less than 300 people in there, it was 250. And EuroPython is 1000.

More questions? We have strict times to switch the session?

Yeah, exactly, any question or anything that you forget to ask or maybe you end up with other questions later, just stop by the registration

desk or take us around and we will be happy to reply to all the questions. Can we have a spring this weekend for our Python for the architecture of the website and the rest on this weekend we have sprint?

Eventually we should probably organize a sprint for volunteers, we can set this up. And the organizers will be there anyway, so help people check the information that we need

or if there are stuff that we can do on the website, I think both. We do have some.

So we are in the General Assembly.

For the General Assembly, because this is a very formal kind of thing that we have to do, we'd like to ask all the EPS members to sit in the front row so that we know where to stop counting for the vote. Yeah, everybody's welcome, it's just easier.

And then everyone else can just sit in the back rows.