All right, so this is the official part of the EPS. To be honest, it's a bit boring, but I mean, there's nothing much we can do. We have this agenda in the bylaws, and so we need to do it this way.

Do we have the EPS members all sitting here? Could the voting EPS members please sit in the first few rows so that it's easier for us to basically do the voting? And then, of course, everyone else is welcome to join. We don't have anything to hide, and if you find this interesting,

then you can sign up to become an EPS member afterwards, of course.

Okay, I'm gonna try something which may not work.

Unfortunately, we have a number of people who are not here at the conference.

I'm gonna try to use Skype to basically join them here.

Okay. He's not answering, so let's just go ahead. Okay, so first of all, welcome to all the new EPS members that we have. We signed up a couple of more EPS members

in recent weeks. We now have 182 members. This is much better without the transition. So, meeting business. What we need for the General Assembly is we need to basically decide on a chairperson for the meeting. We need a secretary,

and we need two checkers of the minutes. So, the first thing that we need is a chairperson chairing it. I would suggest that, I don't know, maybe Alexander can do this, because you have the microphone.

Then we need a secretary, someone who can take the minutes. Taking the minutes basically means you have to take down what we discussed, and then you have to record the votes, the voting results that we have,

and we need then two checkers of the minutes. So, basically, okay, Stefan will do the minutes, and then we need two checkers. Basically say that, okay, these minutes are correct. Daria and who else? Christian. So, the first task for Stefan would be

to now note the names of the two checkers, the secretary and himself. Do you need a piece of paper? And normally, the chairperson of the meeting

also does the voting. So, Alexander, the first thing that you have to do is you have to establish, we have to have a motion establishing the timeliness of the call of the General Assembly, and then we need to vote on that. So, just to, as maybe as reminder or introduction

to how this works, timeliness of the call, the bylaws say that we have to call for the General Assembly 14 days before the actual General Assembly, and up to five days before the General Assembly, we can make changes to the agenda, and the suggestions from the board or board candidates.

Yes, that's fine. I'm not prepared. Yeah, so, as anybody's saying,

it was did not call for this meeting in time, no? So, I can say the meeting was called timely. Wait, abstentions. Oh, okay, we have to do all the voting. Sorry, I'm not, that. It's the usual kind of process. Anyone against, abstain, anyone?

Who's saying everything was in time, abstains? Oh, we have like, you're abstaining? Huh? You're not, like, you say yes. Okay, two, four, six. Stefan, what you also need is,

we need a list of all the EPS members who have attended the General Assembly, so please pass around a piece of paper. Okay, so I think we managed that part, so let's go to the next one.

As far as I see, everybody said yes. Abstain? No, just like for double checking? No, 16 yes. Okay, so next thing is the annual report by the board. So this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna show you the preliminary results from 2016, the actual 27 timeline,

not the one that I just showed in the previous talk, and then how we're gonna move on. So these are the preliminary results from 2016. Preliminary, because we don't have the complete, we've not gone through the complete balance sheet with the local organization, the ACPISS in,

from Bilbao yet, but this is what they reported to us. So the conference made a profit of €71,481.55. This currently includes €17,920

pending sponsor payments, so what the, they are still having issues getting all the sponsors to actually pay. We've done a round of emails, so we managed to get a few of them to pay, but this amount is still basically blocked. If we do get all the sponsor payments,

of course the EPS share will be 50%, and then we'll get €35,740.77 from the ACPISS, and that will go towards the EPS budget that we have. If you compare that to the previous years, it's a little lower than 2016,

and the reason being that for 2017, we basically spent a bit more money on nice things, like for example the booths that we had in Bilbao. This was actually a good investment because we had lots of sponsors who really liked those booths, and they signed up again for this year,

so it made a lot of sense to do this investment. Yes, sorry, sorry, yes, yes, yes, you're right, 2015. Let me just fix that, I can fix it later, there you go.

Compared to 2014, that's a much better result, and as you can see, we're actually getting some money in to basically work on the mission, the new mission that we have that we want to support other organizations in Europe.

Right now, we're still, okay, what we have in the bank right now is, or we had in the bank because we gave a loan to the local organization for this year, we had in the bank about 46,000, and 40,000, we basically gave a loan

to the Python Italia organization so that they can basically finance the initial contract payments that we had to do for this venue. So let's have a look at the actual timeline of 2017. So last year in July, we had the election of the new board, and August to October, we did the selection process.

The selection process took longer than expected because we had a few issues with the venues that we originally had chosen or looked at, let's put it that way. So originally, the idea was to do it in Como

or do it in Milano. This didn't work out because the costs were literally twice as much as what we pay here, and so it wouldn't have been sustainable, so we couldn't do it, so we had to go and then find new locations, and Christian then identified some more. It was, I think, Genoa, Riccione, and Rimini.

And another one? No, I think those three. And then eventually, we then decided to go with Rimini. We had another candidate, which was Brno, in the Czech Republic, but the problem there was that the venue did not really,

I mean, the venue was a nice venue, and it had enough rooms, but there was no room that was available for doing large plenary sessions, so they had a room which was very, very long, and so the people in the back wouldn't have been able to see the screen in the front, and so that was a pity. So this is always important when you go to,

when you select venues, that you always have to make sure that everything is actually suited for a conference of this size. Anyway, so we decided on Rimini, and then we started the whole process of basically getting everything going with the contract and so on. We launched the preview website early on,

but we did not put any dates on it, and the reason was that we had, of course, not signed the contract yet. We started the negotiations with the venue in November, and it literally took until February to basically come to an agreement, and then the final agreement was signed in April.

So early in April, we signed the contract with the venue, and that was basically the start for us to actually do sponsor agreements, because, of course, if you don't have a venue agreement, and you want to enter agreements with other people, relying on that agreement, you can't. So this caused a serious delay in everything,

and we had to basically postpone a lot of things because of that. By December, the refactoring was done, so Patrick basically had, where's Patrick? There he is. He finished the port to Django 1.8, and we now have a current Django CMS version running

on the website as well, which is very good. I think she should deserve a big hand for that. Right, so we now have a modern website again.

We had to fix a few issues because there were still some things left from the old code, but over the various last few months, we sorted out a few things. So in January, we started the active work in the work groups, which was way too late. We should have started much earlier. In March, we started the website.

Then in April, the ticket sales. We did the CFP talk voting in May, and schedule was also late in May. And then now you can see us here during the conference. So it was a really, really hot ride that we had there. It was really a lot of work. We did not have enough volunteers to do everything.

Which is why several people had to put in a lot of work, especially Christian, who basically was our interface to the venue, because unfortunately, the only person at the venue actually speaking English was the secretary of the manager that we had for the venue, which of course did not really help.

And also for sourcing all the local shops, like for example, getting the water dispensers. That was done by Christian, and it's a huge list. He pretty much managed all the things that we had to do here to get the conference

off the ground, and did a huge number of things. So really, I think he deserves a hand as well. Right, and now we're sitting here doing the general assembly. So this is the ticket sales development.

I don't know if I can, is there a mouse somewhere? Yeah, there you go. So, in this chart, these are the various conference years. And if you see here, this is 2017, this green chart.

And this shows the ticket sales for the conference. And down here, these are the social event tickets. And it's not hard to see, but here at the very end, these are the dates from July 7th,

so just before the conference. So we now have a spark here going up like this. I don't know why. Perhaps people found Remini so nice that they definitely wanted to come along to the social event, or maybe they just didn't know that there was a social event.

If you look at the past years, it always seems to happen like that. But this year was particularly strong. We had a very strong spike there. But if you look here, these lines, by the way, are like different special dates, like for example, the opening of the CFP, opening of the talk voting.

The early bird sales were here. And like I said, it was in the, I think I didn't say it, no I did not. The early bird sales for 2017 was literally just one day. So we got sold out in one day.

So this is the spark here. And then we had, with the regular sales, we had a very slow kind of start, and that made us a bit nervous. And then after we had the schedule published, which was around here somewhere, then, or the session list, I think, and the schedule came later,

then it started picking up. And as you can see, it ends here, but now, right now, we are basically here again. So kind of the same level again as we had in the previous years. What we found when working on the website, by the way, is that this chart, it has all the ticket sales.

So the numbers are not really 100% correct. The ticket sales include day tickets, of which we usually don't sell a lot. But this year, for some reason, we sold quite a few. And it also includes canceled tickets. So we have this refund policy so that people can, up to, I think,

one month before the conference, they can basically get a full refund of everything. And quite a few people do this. So for example, they buy an early bird ticket and then just wait whether they can actually come and then just ask for a refund just one month before the conference. And this is not included in here. It is included, the number up here, the 1,011,

that's with the refunded tickets removed. The chart does not show this. So basically, if you compare the various years, we always have more or less the same outcome because I don't think that in previous years, we had fewer refunds.

Okay, so what did we do for the organization? Of course, we invited more volunteers to work with us on the organization. We removed many inactive members. I mean, members that were still marked

as being members of the work groups but were actually not doing anything. We basically turned them into inactive. We've had to fix a few small issues with the website. We fortunately found a few more very active volunteers. So Valeria, where is she? She's not here anymore, she just left.

So she was very active and doing a lot of things. Sylvia, I don't think she's here. Don't see her, she helped me with the sponsors. Mario, where's Mario? There you are. He was just, he's our water bottle man. So because of him, you have water in your bottles,

essentially. And he, oh yeah, this was, sorry, yeah, this was of course, this was just at the conference and of course, he helped before the conference. Every time you went to the, you had a ticket open on the help desk and he was one of the most active ones answering those tickets and dealing with that

and I think he did a really excellent job and I think he needs a hand as well. Then we have Manuel Schipper. He could not attend the conference unfortunately but hopefully next year, he can make it. He helped a lot with the programmer group.

And then of course, oh yeah, and communication, right. Several blog posts that we posted were written by him. And then we have Piper, it's like a virtual volunteer. So this is something that Alex Savio wrote. It's a bot and the bot was actually very helpful

because it kept just going to the help desk for example and just finding out where the new tickets open and then posted them to the Telegram groups which was a very good integration because you don't then actively have to go to the help desk every time to find out whether something new is there.

And that was very good. For the sponsors, the Piper does the sponsor agreements. So every time we get a new sponsor, then we just say okay. They give us the details, the billing details and then Piper goes away and then just does the PDF for the agreement. Unfortunately, Alex Savio could not make it to this conference because he has to learn German.

And hopefully maybe next year he can join again. So that's very, very unfortunate that he changed jobs and couldn't continue his very active help until then, that point. These are the most active team members in 2017.

So as you can see, not very many people. And this is the reason why it was really a lot of work for most people on this list. Right, then there's an issue of course and I don't want to hide it.

This is the Python Italia setup that we had. Originally we thought because Python Italia had run EuroPython for three years in Florence very successfully with lots and lots of help, with lots of enthusiasm, we originally thought when basically working with them

again for this year that everything would be more or less the same. And it turned out that something we didn't know was that Python Italia had a huge issue, or has a huge issue with having volunteers or finding volunteers themselves. And so essentially the only help that we got

was Patrick who worked a lot on the website and he also, because he's now the chair of Python Italia, he also was very responsive in signing the contracts of course, and we had Matteo help with the bank transfers and the finances. So basically Matteo was our interface to the financial side of things.

But essentially that was about it for the help from Python Italia. We did have a lot of help from Francesco, he's not here, here on site. So when we came to the conference,

Francesco started basically just living up to being a really good volunteer and he helped a lot on site. So essentially basically our expectations were not fulfilled and this had a huge burnout effect on the active organizers. So what we did is, to ask compromise for this,

we basically changed the contract details that we had. Originally the idea was always to do a 50-50 split between the local organization and the EPS for the profit. And we've now renegotiated that to cap the amount, the profit share of the Python Italia to 10K.

And we're both fine with that and I think that's a good solution to basically the issue. Of course, this whole thing reminded us that we need to rethink the whole way of how we do conferences because what happened this year should never happen again

because it's simply, if it ever happens again and we don't have volunteers who are willing to put in three to 400 hours into the organization, then your Python won't happen, simple as that. And so we need to figure out how to, when going forward, how to address this

and to make it less of an issue when basically volunteers break away. And we're gonna discuss this in this open space session later on. So we don't have any good basically recipe for this of how to do it. We have a couple of ideas of how we can improve things

but it's very difficult to actually communicate. Because on one hand, we don't want to make it look like that, okay, let's start differently just to give you some idea of what the issues are.

When your Python goes to a country, then of course, your Python is a large conference and so you get a lot of attendees there. When that country has a local conference, like a local PyCon, it essentially means that basically your Python overrides the local conference.

And it's, we've seen that with Python, PyCon Italia, when they did your Python and then your Python moved on to Berlin in that case, what happened for PyCon Italia is that their attendee counts, they dropped by at least 50%,

probably even more. I don't remember the exact numbers but Giovanni told me that it was a significant hit for them and it was very hard for them to basically reach the same levels again as they had before the conference. And this is one issue. The other issue is that of course, when you have a local team or you want the local team

to actually participate in this, they need to be available. So if you have the local conference and your Python be too short after each other with not enough time for the local team to basically recover and get new energy and so on, then you can basically not rely

on the local team anymore. So that's one of the issues that we have to address. The other issue is that the local teams often don't have the expertise to talk to venues like these because they usually do the conferences in much smaller venues or even hotels where it's a lot easier to negotiate these things.

With these venues, they really try to make a lot of money and so you have to be very, very careful when setting everything up. We do know how this works and so we need to basically, we need to do the negotiations directly with the venue instead of just going via a local team.

Anyway, I'm gonna talk more about that in the open space session. But this slide already shows a few things that we need to address. So we want to not rely so much or having to rely so much on the onsite teams anymore.

We want to set up the whole process of selecting venues using a commercial RFP process. I don't know if you know how that works. So essentially, you send them a spreadsheet with all your questions and they have to fill it in. You set up a timeline for that. They need to send you contracts and then basically, they are competing for you.

So the venues would be competing for your Python conference rather than us saying, we want to do the conference at your site, which puts us into the weak position because they know they are the only conference venue in that location which can actually do your Python. You normally don't have two in a single location

for more than 1,000 attendees. This process would make it better for us because they would compete for us and we'd also get better prices. And then we also want to move away from this profit sharing with the onsite teams. Instead, what we want to do is, or what we are, not what we want to do,

but what we think would be a good approach would be to issue grants. And with grants, I mean not just a few thousand euros, but significant grants like 10K, 20K, depending on how well everything worked out. So these are some of the ideas that we have.

Nothing is set in stone yet. We need to discuss. So we think that we want to get into contact with local teams. This is basically meant for later on in this open space. We are already discussing

with people in the Czech Republic, so we're currently looking at Prague as one candidate. The other candidate is Edinburgh in Scotland. We don't have, actually we don't have a group there yet we can talk to, but we know a couple of people really well which we can ask

and which could provide support for us there. But of course we're gonna do the RFP with more venues than just these, also to get a better view of what's available, what we can do. And then we probably have to decide on the venue based on the venue quality and the cost that we have,

and then talk to the local team to make everything, to work out everything and to make sure that we don't override their local conference and that we don't get in the way because we want to work together with the local team because the whole point of the EPS

is to help the community, not to work against it, right? Okay, so I need to speed up a bit. We still have this issue with the domains, with the europizon.org domain, but we've not done anything. We have a europizon.tv domain which basically goes to the YouTube channel.

We use europizon.io for systems, europizon.eu for the website. We have the trademark, of course, we tried for this conference to create a new logo. The process didn't really work out that well. We tried 99designs to get a new design. Didn't really help. Then we basically hired the designer from last year again

to update the logo and we came up with this logo which is inspired by the sea and the umbrellas that you have here on the beach. So it looks nice. I think everybody likes it. And this worked well. Then for the EPS organization,

last year, if you remember, we discussed moving the EPS out of Sweden and to some other place where we have more control, especially because we, at that time, we did not have any access to our own bank accounts. But fortunately, Anders Hammerquist volunteered to help us with this.

He works at Open End, the organization where we have our registered address. So that's very helpful. He can get all the paperwork for us. He is very well connected locally to accountants and to banks.

So what he did is he essentially set up new bank accounts for us at the SEB. So before that, we were at Sweatbank. We closed that account, or those accounts. We had two. We now have two new accounts for euros and for SEK at the SEB. And setting this up was very easy

because he personally knows people at the SEB branch, and so this really made things a lot easier. He also helped us get the VAT ID. This was a bit of a mess before because we already had tried to get a VAT ID before, and they basically declined as giving one.

They declined giving us one. And usually if they decline once, it's hard to then actually get one afterwards. But he managed to do that, and so we now have a VAT ID, which makes it possible for us to, for example, invoice the sponsors directly. And that's what we've also done for EuroPython 2017.

So all the sponsor money goes directly to the EPS. So this is very good news. So essentially what we did, and at that point was we postponed this moving to a different country. What we still have to figure out is whether we can,

by using that VAT ID that we have, whether we can get VAT back from other EU countries. We had an accountant. She told us that it's not possible to do this because the EPS is a non-profit. Now we have a new accountant,

and they are more experienced in EU VAT issues, and perhaps we can figure out a way to make that work because it would enable us to actually then enter contracts with the venues directly rather than going through the local organization. VAT in general is a huge issue. It looks easy to handle between companies,

but because of the EU regulations for conferences, the regulation going like this, when you do a conference in a certain location, you have to pay the VAT in the country of that location. So EPS being in Sweden, in this case,

EuroPython being in Italy, it means that we have to pay taxes in Italy. In order to pay taxes in a country, you have to have a local tax representative for that. So we would have to hire, now we have Python Italia doing this, of course, which makes things easier, but normally we'd have to then hire a local tax representative doing all the tax reporting,

and then we'd have to get the taxes back again from Italy, basically, against all the expenses that we have and so on. And then because we don't know whether we can get VAT back in Sweden for expenses that we have in other countries,

we basically decided to go with a local organization, do everything via that, and then basically not have this issue. So what we did in order to make that happen is we gave 40K to Python Italia at a 0% loan,

and basically in order to handle all the initial payments for the contract here, all the direct contacts were done by Python Italia, so they basically sign up for the venue, and so going forward, unless we get this whole thing

with the EU VAT sorted, we have to continue doing this to make things easier. So right now, Python Italia is doing the ticketing, doing the local sourcing of things that we need, and we basically get all the sponsorship money directly into the EPS, and then later on, when we basically then decide on how things should work out

how the budget should be, split the profit and so on, we have to then do one transfer at the very end between the two organizations to make to even out everything. Okay, so I already talked about this, EPS wants to become something like a European Python Software Foundation, so we want to help the community.

Short term, we funded PyCon-DE 2016, we funded Django Girls, Europe Python, with around 7,000 euros, and we add this ticket discount coupon activity, so basically we send out emails to user groups in Europe

to give them easier access to the Europe Python conference. Right, and I'm getting a bit tired, so now is the time for the treasurer report. Yes, current assets in the bank account,

right, Anders sent the details, where's my mouse? There it is.

He sent the details just a few minutes ago, so let me see whether I can find them, interesting.

Okay, so I can't see what you're seeing, so let's just say I showed this, right?

So like I said, we gave around 40K to Python Italia, so before we had the payments from the sponsors coming in, we essentially, well, we didn't have anything much left

in the bank accounts, so I think maybe should be something like 10K or so. I don't know whether it shows up here somewhere.

That is a good question. It could be an SEK, unless it says somewhere. No, it says EU up there, no, that's EU. It's just where it says. Okay, I'm gonna report this afterwards

when I have actually had the time to look at this. Anyway, we have enough money, we have at least 40K because we're gonna get that back. We're gonna get the extra money from 2016 in the next few months, and then we're gonna finish this conference, probably with a profit as well.

It's not clear yet on how big that profit will be. But it's gonna be a profit of at least 10K, I think.

Probably more like in the area of like 30K. So, yeah, 30K, like what we had in the last year. Right, so we have two bank accounts, SEK for Swedish Kronus. We need that account because all the local tax payments go in SEK. Plus, if we want to send money elsewhere, we have to, like for example, USD,

we have to use that account, and we have a Euro account for everything else. Then we have PayPal, it's connected to SEK account, and we have a credit card now. All thanks to Anders. So, Anders is watching this on video, so maybe we can give him a big hand for helping us.

Okay, now it's time for the auditor report. Auditor this year was Stefan. Stefan, do you have anything to say?

I discussed with Anders and with Mark about the account thing, and in fact, we have no issues with the account thing. We need, we wait for some invoice for some payments, but everything is okay for me, because I checked the incoming invoice,

and then the how going for the sponsoring, and except that for the conversion from dollars to Euro, everything is okay. So, do that, put that in the notes as well, so.

So, the next point on the agenda is discharge from liability for the 2016-2017 board, so we need to vote now. So, do we discharge the board from liability for last year's work?

Everybody who is in favor, please raise your hand. I think the board should abstain, right? Abstain, abstain, everybody, 16.

Yeah, so 16 in favor, zero abstains, zero, yes, no. Two, four, six, eight, 10, 12, 14, oh, 15, 16.

I'm watching, yeah, yeah, 16, yeah, 2016. Okay, thank you very much. Then we have candidates for the board 2017-2018. As you can see, a couple of board members did not run again for board,

a couple of, well, from the existing board. So, we have Christian, we have Daria, we have a new candidate, it's Jill. Jill, maybe you can say a few things about yourself. Please welcome Jill. Hello, I'm Jill, and I like Python,

and I like helping out here. Yeah, that's what it is. So, you've probably seen Jill run around the conference venue all the time. He's chair of the support work group, so he has a lot to do there.

Then we have Anders. Anders is not here, unfortunately. Anders would like to run for board as well, and he manages basically the financial side of things, and he would then, if he is elected for board, he would then become the treasurer of the EPS.

Alexander, you know myself, and Alex Savio, he cannot be here, but he still wants to help on the board, and he has lots of institutional knowledge and contacts. So, the existing board thinks that this new board is actually a very good board.

So, now let's vote for the individual members. So, we're gonna do individual votes. What we are gonna do is we're gonna vote for each one, the positive votes, abstains, and then no votes, and then someone gets on the board if they have more yes votes than no votes.

That's how it works. Now, we first vote for Christian, Christian Barra. So, who's in favor for Christian Barra being board?

Christian, you're undecided yet? You're yes as well. So, let's say, 16 in favor, just double checking. Any abstain? None favor, okay, 16 votes for Christian. No, yeah, no zero, no, yeah, huh? Of course, you can vote for yourself.

Everybody can vote for themselves, huh? Yeah, sure, you can vote for themselves, yes. Yes, you can vote not to vote. So, the next is Daria. Okay, so who's in favor for Daria staying and being a board member for this year?

Abstain? Abstain? Who's not, who says no? So, basically, yeah, it's also like, you're also voting for yourself? Okay, then we have 16, yes. Let's just like keep it simple.

Yeah, 16. All right, next for Jill. Jill Bertel, concafs. So, who's in favor for Jill? And I said, 16. Stefan, you're so in favor, yeah. So, 16, yes.

Just like for the record, abstain? No, okay, 16 in favor. And then for Anders Hammarquist, in favor? Yeah, so it's 16 in favor, abstain? No, okay, zero, no.

Then I would like to ask Daria to do the next board candidate because I cannot be leading the session and more like chairing. Who's in favor of voting for B. Alexander Henderth

in the board this next year? Plus one, we have 17.

Roberto. Abstain?

Okay, let's continue with Mark Andre Lambert, or chair, who's in favor? So, that's 17, yes, abstain? No, okay, Alexander Savio,

who's in favor? Like, 17 in favor, abstain? No, yeah, zero, zero, 16, 17 in favor. Okay, then we need to elect a chair of the board.

I basically nominated myself again. Which, I mean, no one wants to do this, so. Who's in favor of Mark Andre stays our well beloved chair?

So, I see 17 in favor, just like abstain? No, so 17 in favor, zero, zero. Then we have something new this year. This is kind of like a bit of a last minute thing. We want to add a new position

to the EPS vice chair position, because the bylaws currently only have a chair position, and because the chair is rather important for the EPS, because the chair has to essentially sign the contracts, if the chair breaks away, then basically the EPS becomes, well, dysfunctional, so it cannot operate anymore.

And what we think is it would be a good idea to have a vice chair position, so that the vice chair can then basically fulfill the chair positions in case the chair has to step down, or just, it's not available anymore. So, it says please vote here.

You haven't seen the changes. These are the changes, so you can just, I can just read them. So, one change is that we have, on the agenda for the General Assembly, we're gonna add election of the vice chairperson of the board, and then position 13,

it now says the board consists of a chairperson, a vice chairperson, and two to seven board members. Previously, we had just a chairperson and two to eight board members, the chair not being counted in this case as board member. And in this case, in case the chairperson steps down, during the election term, the vice chairperson shall replace the chairperson

for the remainder of the term. So, in case the vice chairperson steps down as well, the board may elect an intermediate chair for the remaining of the term, or call in a General Assembly to vote in a new board. So, this is what the old board would like to suggest as change.

We need to vote on this. Does anyone have any issues with this? I mean, just maybe all questions before we vote. Okay, then let's vote. Who's in favor for this bylaws change? Yeah, 17 in favor.

Abstain. So, this being effective now, we need to vote on a vice chair. And Alexander nominated himself, or I pushed him to, so. Who is in favor of Alexander Hendorf as the co-chair?

Who is obtained? No. Okay, next thing.

So, we need, again, an auditor for the bank accounts, and we need one replacement in case the auditor becomes unavailable to do the actual auditing. Any volunteers for this?

Okay, so who's in favor that Stefan, or should we nominate the, yeah, who's in favor, who's, that Stefan is the auditor for the European Society? It's just for one year, so it's, I mean, not. So, 17, yes, abstain. Nobody against, also nobody.

And we need a replacement, or basically a backup. Yes, and I think the, yeah, we need somebody. Yeah, we need one more, like a replacement auditor. Some, we need a volunteer, because Raoul was doing it before,

it's not here, unfortunately. So, and actually, it's an easy job. Actually, I started as an auditor, I mean, like, in Berlin, so, yeah, so it's an easy thing. So, is the auditor? We need to speed up a bit.

Yeah, is the auditor, must the auditor be a member? No. No? Okay, then, Mario volunteered to be an auditor. So, who's in favor of, for Mario Thiel to become the placement auditor, or like, backup auditor? Okay, I see 17 in favor. Abstain.

No. Okay, just to double check, because you raised your hand to enter, like, are you EPS members? Are you already EPS members? Could I just ask, what's the next session after this one? Just like check, okay, so, 17 yes,

and zero abstains, and zero no's. Coffee break, okay. So, can we overrun a bit, or is it?

Yeah, it's a 345. Okay, so let's just speed up a bit, and then, so that we should still manage this. So, the next thing is optional election of a nomination committee. The idea being that we have a committee that basically then checks all the nominations and proposes them for the next election.

We've so far never needed this. We don't think we're going to, so the board thinks that this is not needed, but it's really up to you. I mean, if you think this is needed, then please speak up. Otherwise, we can vote on not having it.

Who's in favor that we said, oh no, let's say, who's okay that there's no election committee, sorry, nomination committee

as proposed by the board. Omelettes, 17 yes, abstain, no, thank you. Okay, we're almost done. So, budget presentation. So, basically, this is what we did

with the money that we had. Like I said, we funded a few smaller events. We also started buying for this conference. We started buying goods that we want to keep as EPS. Those will be EPS-owned. So, we bought power strips quite a lot, 150, 140 of those.

We bought the roll-up displays that you see around here, the schedule banner, the large one outside. Those were all bought in a way that you can reuse them in future years. So, we're gonna put everything into storage box here in Rimini and then when we have the location for the next conference, we're just gonna ship everything over there. We bought the TVs, we bought routers,

we bought APs for the wireless, backup APs using mobile SIM cards. We rented the storage box for everything and we have regular expense, which is the only regular expense that we have. It's the web servers, about 100 euros per month. And everything else that we did

was basically handled by Matteo from Python Italia with the help of Christian. Christian landed his credit card because Python Italia doesn't have one and for buying on Amazon you need one. So, he helped a lot there. So, this is basically the budget presentation

that we have. I could also show you the budget, but we don't have time for that now, unfortunately. I can show you later on if you want to or you can just come to me. So, we need to vote on accepting the budget and we need to vote on the decision on the membership fees. So far, the membership fees have always been,

no, not always, actually. They were one euro in the early days, but no one actually collected the euro. And then at some point we set it to zero, which is more realistic. Right. Yeah, it's two votes, yes. So, who's in favor of that we accept

the budget as proposed? Who's against the budget with this as well? I think that you will, but you will see. Oh, no, no, we're on the budget.

We're on the slide before. We're on the budget vote. So, okay then. Again, who's in favor that this budget is fine for our financial plans? Just the planning thing, actually. So, 16 abstain. One abstain and against, no's, there are no's. Okay, and now we move to the membership fees.

Do you, there's something you want to say, or, like, Ms. Cusser?

Yeah, I, I, mm-hmm. No, I think, mm-hmm.

So, it could give society, I don't know, it could give some amount of the budget, but it could give to the European Society a 5K budget that could be useful for not only to be sent to the spending card, for example.

Oh, that's like, no, the thing is, I mean, we only have, like, 180 members, or do you know? 182, yes, for example, yeah. And basically collecting the money, five euros, which I think would be a fair amount, but we also would have, like, a lot of administration stuff, and we would carry it, so basically, I think, basically, I think we should rather stick

with zero, because we have administration overhead then, and we need a wallet here to do that, and, you know, like getting people's bank accounts and stuff, so I don't think, I don't think we really make any money from it worth the effort, that's why. Okay, any more comments, ideas?

Raise it to 1000 euros, no. Because then the administration is over, so okay. That would be a realistic amount, too. Who's in favor that we, the membership fee stays at zero euros for the next year? Okay, I think that's Stefan, like 17. Abstains?

No, like 17 in favor, abstains. Okay, forget the please vote here, because we have not received any motions from the members, so we can skip this, and we're done. So, if you have any questions, please ask now, or if it's something specific to 2018,

then please come to the open space session, otherwise, I'd say thank you.