Running EuroPython 2020 as an online conference
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BitMeeting/Interview
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:06
All right, so you probably already know me, I'm going to talk about running EuroPython 2020 as an online conference versus running it as an in-person conference, what we had originally planned. So a bit about myself, I'm Mark
00:28
Lemberg, I'm based in Düsseldorf in Germany, I studied mathematics, I have a company, we're running Python projects, I often work as an interim CTO or a
00:41
senior software architect for clients. I'm a Python core developer but don't really commit anything much anymore, I help with discussions and these things. I am EuroPython Society Chair and have been for a while now, I am a founding member of the Python Software Foundation and that's about it. So I've been
01:10
running EuroPython as a chair, I think this is the third year now, so we have developed a lot of experience running in-person events. Now as you all know
01:22
what happened this year, we started the organization late in November, as we usually do, we first do an RFP request for proposals from the different venues which is a commercial kind of process that we run to find venues that are
01:41
affordable and then we had that, we had the results for the RFP available in November and then we started to work with Dublin. We prepared everything, we you know configured the website, we put the content there, we had a logo designed, everything was really put in place, everything was ready
02:01
for starting the ticket sales in March and then you know as so many other conferences then we had to face the COVID-9 situation. Things developed very very quickly around that time, so in February we still thought okay we're doing the conference in July so it's not going
02:21
to be a problem, we can still go ahead with this and that's also what we told people. Then in March 12 things got you know a lot worse, Ireland became you know they started to put some restrictions up and then we contacted
02:42
the venue and discussed with them what we can do about this because of course like Naomi mentioned yesterday in the keynote we had the problem, we had signed the contract already and we would not have been able to get out of the contract without actually paying I think it was
03:02
80% of the total fee that we had signed up for, which in our case was you know a significant amount, I think around 200k or something, so there was no possibility for us to do that. Then of course even though the
03:20
government in Ireland had not really banned these events just yet it was you know becoming obvious that it would, so we discussed with them what to do and then we decided and or they offered us to postpone the event to next year around the same time and so that's what we did on March 17th and then we
03:41
we thought okay what are we going to do now, we're just going to drop the event, are we going to continue, we're not really sure what what the community felt about this and so we ran a poll and this is the result of the poll so as you can see here, I don't know if it's readable, it's around we had 308 responses around 78% said well they would like to have a virtual
04:05
conference so we we had a look at the results and also the the other data that we got so preferred dates was it was clear that they basically wanted to use the same week probably because they had already made arrangements for
04:20
this and essentially they also wanted to have more or less the same kind of content, I mean a number of days, number of tracks, so we took all that into consideration and then we decided on March 31st we decided to go online with EuroPython 2020. At that point we had no idea what we were
04:47
not aware of how we could run this we just said okay we're going to try to figure out how to do it we then had to spend a couple of weeks shutting down the in-person organization so basically telling all the vendors that we are not going to do it this year we're going to do it next year which
05:02
took some time and then we started to research into the different online possibilities now unfortunately at that point two of the board members of the eight board members that we had at the time they stepped down because they were not interested in running an online event and so we were just left with six people so that was another challenge that we had to face so let me
05:24
just summarize some of the challenges because that's what this talk is also supposed to be about the the purpose of the talk is not so much to present what you know that that we are just such a great organization if the purpose is more to just so so that we we show other conferences how this
05:45
might be possible for them to do as well and we want to provide as much help as we can and provide all the resources that we have created and all the research that we have we have established and and put online so
06:00
that they can benefit from our research because you know like in open source where you write code and you write you know make the code available to others to use we want to do the same thing for the conference organizations that run conferences in the Python space so the challenges that we had of course were we had to redefine the budget the budget was
06:22
already set up for the in-person event same for the pricing structure we had to figure out what to do with the sponsors because of course the sponsor would expect to have a sponsor booth available and lots of attendees coming to the booth talking to them directly and so on now for an online event that doesn't really work and so we had to figure out what to do with
06:40
the sponsors what we did there is we basically replaced the booths with online rooms we gave them zoom rooms so that they can you know talk to people directly we gave them chat rooms we put in some extra features for them to use online so that becomes you know more more attractive for them
07:01
we also reduced the prices a lot for them and we needed to do lots of research so what we did is we for defining redefining the budget we had absolutely no idea what to expect how many attendees would come to the online event so what we did is we basically know played safe we used the
07:23
numbers from the from the poll that we had which turned out to be around 250 paying attendees so that's how we structured our budget and based on that budget and and you know knowing all the costs that we will have we then
07:40
reduce the prices a lot by 75% because we did not have to pay for the venue rent no catering and all these things to you the big cost factors were basically not there anymore but of course we still did have costs the conference costs around 30k and we had to cover that in some way so we put
08:03
that into the budget we came up with new sponsorship packages and then we had a look around for chat systems and audio visual rooms that we could use now a question came up and there was a discussion on on telegram about this
08:20
as well why don't we make it free I just want to you know bring this up because this there was a discussion and there was some back and forth and people wanted to have this free or maybe you know half it at a very low price and and we thought about this a lot and what we what we ended up with
08:41
there is we wanted to have the volunteers that we get for the conference to have them feel that the cut the the work that they're doing is actually worth something so that we are creating a value and and so we decided to use a value-based approach for pricing so we thought what what's the what's the value that we give to to conference attendees by putting
09:04
all this content online making it possible for all the speakers to to provide all this content to the attendees and so free was not really an value and there's also something that I found because lots of conferences
09:24
turned free when going online I really didn't understand what they were doing because they were completely ruining the pricing structures of events if they want to if they have run a conference with the same content and now now it was free and versus where you have to normally pay you know 700 800 or maybe
09:44
you know the commercial ones a thousand or two thousand euros to attend you know there's no relation between those two things if you do it online you do it for free and then you go there and you have to pay a thousand euros dude it doesn't really make sense so the I think the the industry
10:01
there not only the industry also the in the open source world the conference organizers are actually not doing the right thing by making these things free and also specifically for us the Europe and Society uses the income from the conference to provide grants to other conferences and to projects and so this would have completely killed the revenue for us in
10:25
fact we would have to pay those 30k out of our budget and so that was not really an option so we decided to use you know lower prices a lot lower prices but still you know higher than what you normally see for online conferences and that was like we were betting on this that people actually
10:44
will see the value in this and I think you know looking at the attendee numbers that we have right now I think this worked out so I would recommend this to other conferences as well because it's well possible that this status that we have right now will continue for some time right so
11:05
online means we need a lot more volunteers we had to do lots of research we did direct experiments trainings rehearsals trial and errors so we only had six members left who were actually active so we we started to downsize the event to stay on the safe side we put all this
11:24
documentation up online we first we know internally we we came up with a virtual conference concept and then we were also research into all these online conference tools and because there was a lot of research going on we wanted to share this with the with the other organizers organizers we put
11:42
these online and we made a blog post which has the links to these actually I'm going to post these links as well so there is a lot in there that can be used by other conference organizers especially in this online conference tools one but also in the virtual concept one so you can you know
12:01
you know if you're free to copy what what we did and maybe improve upon it right you know use the things that didn't really work that well this year and maybe improve them so what we decided for the chat system is we we wanted to have a system that is you know it's kind of it groups a number of
12:23
channels and the best system that we found to do that was discord so we use discord we had never used discord before so we needed to get in some expert we fortunately we found Jason who is a discord expert and he helped us a lot setting up everything for the audio video we ran a couple of tests we then
12:42
ended up deciding to use zoom and Jitsi Jitsi is a is a free server that you can set up you can also use a shared server that's made available by a company but then over time you know we we thought Jitsi is it's nice but
13:01
it's not really that good for larger events you can maybe have maybe 30 people or so in a Jitsi room what the company says is that the maximum is 50 after that it simply doesn't work anymore so for for the larger things larger you know talks we had to use something else anyway so we decided to
13:22
use zoom and now because of we have so many zoom licenses we basically removed Jitsi completely we scaled down we just have two conference days now three and we have two sprint days so the CFP was already ongoing we had to repurpose that it wasn't really hard to do that we just simply extended the
13:43
CFP and we made everyone aware that whoever had already submitted will now have to do the talk online and most of the speakers actually agree to this we also decided to use the chance to open up a bit more make make the conference available to more time zones so we added extra slots for the Indian
14:03
Asian Pacific time zones and the Americas now you know having more content because we actually did get a lot more content in that we had then we had already originally expected we we started out with three tracks that we wanted to do and then we had to open up a complete fourth track of
14:24
course we had to find more volunteers to help run all this because unlike for an in-person conference where you can just you know you just send the speaker somewhere into a room and then they can just do things there and it's easy to get on-site volunteers we did not really have that possibility so we
14:42
had to find more volunteers and fortunately we found a very very good team we have 18 people now helping with the track hosting and and a few other people helping with other things that behind the scenes the the team that we built was basically built not by doing a call for for volunteers but
15:05
instead we used basically word-of-mouth so we asked the people that we knew and they asked the friends that they had and this worked out really well because we've very quickly got a nice team of excellent you know experts with you know lots of different expertise so we could assign the different roles
15:24
very easily so how do you run online conferences well we ran a lot of experiments with this we joined other events to see how they did it we tried various flows we found that you need two people to run a track one role is
15:42
the session chair which is very much like for the in-person conference the session chair introduces the the speakers and the talks and helps moderate Q&A and these things so it's the session chairs more talking to the to the attendees and and the the speakers whereas the room manager has a
16:03
more technical role the room manager will then take care of onboarding the speakers making sure that you know microphone works screen sharing works all this technical stuff and also manages finding the speakers before the session so that they can get on board on time room manager we also have for the in-person conference but the room manager for the in-person conference is
16:23
completely different this has a complete different role now the online session hosting is a lot different than what you do for an in-person conference and and that's something that if you're running in-person conferences and want to switch to online you have to be aware of there are many technical
16:40
challenges the most difficult one is getting the internet connections working and making sure that everything is done you know you have to have backups you have to figure out what to do in case the connection goes down for example we ask for slides so that we can run them and then people can can join by phone fortunately we did not so far have to do this we also ask
17:05
people to you know send in videos of recorded sessions in case they were going offline during the session there are lots of personal challenges you know talking just to webcam it doesn't feel like an in-person conference so it's you have to imagine that there's this crowd sitting there listening to
17:25
you but it's difficult and we you know for example the applause that we all always play this is something that we found in other conferences where they did not have this this was really the major lacking thing from our
17:41
perspective and so we added this it was simple to add so it feels a bit more like an in-person conference you need a lot more organization you need to practice a lot you need to train everyone we had lots and lots of training sessions we ran two and a half weeks of speaker training sessions
18:02
sometimes two sessions a day I think it really paid out because we don't have a lot of issues also this part we had a document of course so for the host we have a hosting guide and we currently don't have that online we we are gonna clean this up a bit and then turn it online so that others can
18:20
use it as well we sent a speaker guide to the speakers where everything is basically explained the flow is explained what they have to pay attention to tools are explained you know all these different things that are important to know as a speaker both of these guides are more than 30 pages so just to give you an idea of how much you actually have to think about and
18:46
this again proved to be very beneficial because you know the conference is running work very smoothly so let's do a reality check so where did we end up originally we had like I said we planned in the budget with 250 people but of course there was a hope that we get more people so we
19:05
hope to have something like four to five hundred conference attendees and it turned out that we actually sold 650 tickets or around 650 tickets plus we meant made the the sprint tickets free because we wanted to attract more
19:23
developers and also you know our mission is to help Python projects so we wanted to help open source projects there attract more volunteers and so we originally had expected around 200 people for the sprint only tickets and
19:40
it turns out that right now we have 390 sign ups for the sprints only plus of course the conference attendees also can also go to the sprints so we're going to see how many days how many people we're going to have tomorrow and then maybe we have to you know increase the size of the sprint teams a lot what's important to know for other conference organizers is
20:01
that the dynamics of ticket sales are a lot different compared to an in-person conference there's no preparation that you have to do as an attendee for an online conference you can simply hop on and so most of the ticket sales happen in the last last two or maybe even just the last week so that's
20:21
something to be aware of don't get worried people will show up and will sign up right and because I wanted to make this a bit more interesting on the technology side I put up this slide I wanted to explain to you what technology we're using so of course we have the the Django website over here which is what we always have we have that for the in-person conference
20:43
as well of course it does the registration of tickets tickets twice the payments the it matches you know registration of talks the CFP and also provides all the the content that we need then you have the main discord server down here which we decided to use as a platform so everything is
21:03
linking from the discord server to everything else so that it's you know for the attendees it's easier to to find things we set up initially we didn't want to set up a lot of channels but then we found that it's probably a good idea to to have one channel per talk so we ended up with I
21:21
think it's around 170 channels that we have right now which is a bit overwhelming but we found that and people also appreciated it that we have these breakout channels so that they can you know people can continue to ask questions get in touch with the speakers more directly so that's it's a
21:44
good format it's something that if you run an event like this you should consider as well it's only important to have some consistency in there so the naming of the channels should be consistent and you always need to mention the names of the channels when the session runs so that people can
22:01
easily find it then we have a basically a zoom setup for for all the audio video so we have in total 18 zoom licenses running now for the rooms three of sorry four of those rooms have an add-on for the webinar which is what's running now here in this track for example this is basically meant for
22:24
for running events where you have lots and lots of attendees and you want to have a little bit more control over what what the attendees can do and what the panelists can do versus in the in the standard rooms basically everyone can do everything depending on how you set it up we have seen other events
22:43
that used rooms and they had major issues with spammers fortunately we did not run into those here yet this is also why we asked not to publish the links to the zoom rooms because you know spamming on in this zoom sessions
23:00
is really a major major problem you have to be aware of that and act quickly so we have three for five hundred attendees and one for one thousand because before the conference like I said we had 650 sales so we thought maybe we need a thousand turns out that you don't need the people spread over
23:23
all the the tracks quite a bit so the the 1000 investment here was not really necessary so if you weren't one run one of these events using zoom I think it's perfect if you just use the 500 one down here we added some bots
23:40
the registration bot was very important because this essentially gives you permission to access all the channels on the discord server we initially wanted to do this manually and then Chuck went ahead and wrote a bot for this based on the registration database that we have and so this made it possible for people to self register and this worked out really well I mean
24:02
it's just doing an amazing job that bot we also put up a stream bot which takes snapshots of these sessions taken from YouTube streams and then post pictures of these snapshots to the peak channels that we have I don't know how many people use this it's something that I I wrote a while ago and it's just I
24:24
thought that it would be a good idea to have people you know see what's going on in a in a different room before actually joining it right so then the next big issue is that of course we have to make sure that everything stays up online and because we are all joining from different remote locations
24:45
we all have you know we some have good internet connectivity some some don't sometimes the internet connectivity breaks or so we decided to we don't want to risk that these sessions go down because if the host and
25:01
there's only one house per room that you have in zoom if the host goes down and there aren't any co-hosts to take over then basically zoom shuts down the session and we wanted to not have this happen so what we did is we set up a couple of desktop VMs at Hetzer and those are actually running all the
25:23
there's one VM running all the different sessions so it's host for all the different sessions and then we have for the main four tracks we have additional VMs which are used to run the sponsor ads for example and maybe show other things so that turned out to be really useful and of course we
25:42
have each of us also has a personal setup very diverse so Windows Linux Mac OS all kinds of different Linuxes these are typically set up as a co-host so we have some extra backup and some of some of the co-hosts then also do
26:00
the playing of the sponsor ads directly from there from their system others others go into the VMs and then play the videos like this something to be aware of is that if you want to run this as a co-host or you know anything that has to do with this it's recommended to have at
26:21
least a dual setup dual monitor setup it's even better to have three right so going to production so the major challenges as I mentioned was internet connectivity it turned out that doing lots of at an online event you have to
26:41
do lots of things in parallel you always have to be very very much attentive to what's currently happening you have to watch several different channels you know on discord you have to be aware that the YouTube stream can go down you have to check whether the the zoom sessions are still running whether the VMs are still okay everything is you know very well it's
27:05
not very complex but you have to know how to do things right so you have to train a lot and what you have to do is you cannot plan for everything so you have to accept improvisations you have to be aware that you cannot just you
27:21
know expect everything to work which is fine you know you just have to be aware of that and not not panic too much right so what did we achieve it's actually quite amazing we're running this conference online even though we had no experience running the conference online before we still
27:40
managed to get more or less the same kind of content size as we have for the in-person conference so basically we we address the the what in the poll but people ask for and everything is working quite well I think I haven't heard any you know negatives or people you know having major problems
28:02
so this is definitely a format that works if you know how it works even better if you can you know if you have some experience we now have experience and we like to share this experience with others so if you have any questions please come to us ask us we were there to help right so thank you
28:23
for your attention I can take a few questions if there are any yeah so we have two questions so here's the first one is there a preferred method to give any feedback in hopes that it can be passed on to future online conference organizers Easter I didn't understand the first part is there a
28:45
preferred method the documents I showed they they are public and they and you can comment on them so if you go there even though the virtual concept that we have it hasn't been updated in a while we're going to update it
29:03
after the conference with what we actually did you can comment there you can put extra hints there of what you think would be good or not so good we are going to have a feedback form after the conference like we do for every conference and we're going to send this around probably on Saturday and then
29:23
you can you can put any comments that you have into that feedback form as well so those are the two ways to do that okay so here's the last one from Gil if this works well for the hybrid conference format be a possibility for example people choosing to watch from home with a lighter
29:41
discord moderation plus live streaming without the Q&A from zoom while the conference is happening in a venue well we have been running the in-person conferences with live streaming already and people had the telegram chat so you know we kind of had this kind of set up before we're gonna probably keep
30:05
this we are thinking about maybe using discord for next year as well but you know the hybrid version is not really something that I think it's not going to work well because the the remote people don't have enough contacts but
30:22
let's see I mean maybe we can you know make it happen anyway maybe there are some ideas out there that that we can use okay so I think we have one more question but I think we are out of time now we have the next yeah we can actually take it to the break group and there you can ask your questions to Mark. Thank you very much.