[Conferences] Organizing PyCon in Spain

[Diana Clarke]

Hello from Canada!

We just finished hosting the first PyCon Canada. It was similar in
size (~275 attendees, ~50 speakers, 2 tracks) to what you're looking
to host in Spain.

    http://2012.pycon.ca/

At some point, I should write down our lessons learned, but off the
top of my head here are some notes:

1) We modeled PyCon Canada after PyCon USA. They've been doing this
for years now, and there's a lot you can just copy. I copied a ton,
and they didn't seem to mind ;)

2) Code of Conduct: PyCon USA has a code of conduct, and so should you
(in my humble opinion). We modified it a bit; you should feel free to
do the same (to reflect your local norms and community). Make sure
your communications (twitter, email, etc) to attendees and speakers
make your code of conduct well known in advance. Encourage speakers to
check with your board if they are even a little bit uncertain about
the content of their slides and talks. You don't want your conference
to end up on Hacker News for all the wrong reasons (example:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/CouchDB_talk).

    https://us.pycon.org/2012/codeofconduct/

They even have instructions on how to deal with code of conduct
incidents, so that you're not caught of guard. Train your volunteers
before the conference about your code of conduct. Have printed copies
of these documents on hand for you and your staff at the event.

    https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/harassment-incidents-staff/
    https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/harassment-incidents/

2) Team: PyCon Canada had a board of three that were responsible for
making decisions. We created a non-profit association, so that we
could open a business banking account for the conference. Only the
board members had access to the bank account. In addition to the
board, we also had a core group of organizers (about 5 people) who
attended all of our planning meetings. It took months to put together,
and even then we made mistakes. We met every second week for the first
few months, every week for the last month, and every day leading up to
the event. It takes hours and hours of volunteer work to pull a
conference off. Consider yourself warned! It's worth it though!

3) Roles: Each organizer and board member was responsible for
something: volunteers (we needed about 25 in addition to our team),
raising money (sponsors), audio/video (check out
http://nextdayvideo.com/ and the results
http://pyvideo.org/category/25/pycon-ca-2012), catering (expensive),
the print schedule and program (also really expensive), the conference
website (talk submission form, online schedule, etc), internet/wifi at
the venue, finding a venue (was hard for us), negotiations with the
conference hotel, registration (we used https://guestlistapp.com/),
communications (lots of twitter, we also emailed all attendees once a
week, in the final weeks, with announcements, surprise speakers,
information about the hotel, code of conduct etc), etc...

4) Costs: Everybody pays to attend PyCon USA, even speakers and the
organizers. We decided to do the same. We set the ticket price low
($75), but high enough so that if we didn't end up being able to raise
money from sponsors, we would be at least able to cover our basic
costs (renting the venue, renting audio equipment, etc). As we started
to get sponsors, we added nice-to-haves (free lunch for attendees,
video, print program, stickers, t-shirts, airfare for invited
speakers, etc). We didn't do a good job at making sure people knew in
advance that "everybody pays", which resulted in some awkward email
exchanges between speakers and organizers after talk selection was
complete. Whatever you decide, make sure your decision is clear. Some
PyCons have a "nobody pays" policy, but you might find that people
scoop up your tickets and then not actually attend.

    http://jessenoller.com/2011/05/25/pycon-everybody-pays/

5) Tickets: We doubled the ticket price ($150) for companies that were
sending employees. Individuals that were paying for themselves paid
$75. Students paid $25. We also had a start-up ticket price ($350)
that included some special advertising perks to bolster our local
start-up scene. We kept announcing on twitter etc how many tickets
were remaining (75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, 0%) etc to drive early ticket
sales. We also announced our invited speakers and keynotes in advance
to drive ticket sales. We sold-out about a month in advance. Knowing
the number of attendees in advance, rather than having last-minute
sign-ups, made planning so much easier. If your capacity is limited
(our was, by fire-code), make sure *everyone* has a ticket, even if
its just a placeholder for people like media, volunteers,
photographers, sponsors at their booth (if you decide to have booths),
etc.

6) Sponsors: We created a sponsorship prospectus similar to the PyCon
USA prospectus. Our top sponsorship slot was $10,000 (much lower than
the USA number). Most of our sponsorships came from local companies
that were looking to hire developers or were supporting their
employees that were attending or speaking at PyCon Canada. Big names
(like mozilla, google, etc) were also really supportive and generous.
You'll need to give these larger companies a bit more time to process
your request for sponsorship. You can also ask the PSF for a donation
(http://www.python.org/psf/). Our sponsors
(http://2012.pycon.ca/sponsors) paid us by cheque, and paypal. Like
PyCon USA, we announced our sponsors on twitter, included their logos
in our online and print material, and offered our top sponsors a booth
at the event.

    https://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/prospectus/

8) Schedule: You and your board are responsible for the curation of
your schedule. You do not need to stick to a strict voting system
(which often reinforces the status quo). If you want 25% of your
speakers to be Spanish: make it happen! If you want 20% of your
speakers to be female: make it happen! If you want 20% of your talks
to be academic: make it happen! If you do your homework, hunting down
great speakers from groups that are otherwise underrepresented in our
Python community, none of these speakers will be "token" or
"unworthy". Obviously, you should not just put your friends and
sponsors up on stage, but otherwise you get to decide as a team what
your goals are, and then work toward them.

7) Diversity: From day one, diversity was one of our goals. Google
kindly provided us with $500 diversity grants to help more women
attend PyCon Canada. Google even sent a gift for each of the
recipients. I strongly encourage you to contact them. When we found
that very few women were submitting talk proposals, we reached out
individually to women and encouraged them to submit talks. The PSF,
PyLadies, etc helped us spread the word about the grants, and
encouraged women to submit talks. We also made sure that the invited
keynotes and speakers included women and people working in different
fields (http://2012.pycon.ca/learn). Oops, that page title should
really be "Invited Speakers". Anyway, your invited speakers and
keynotes set the tone for your conference. Diversity is obviously
about more than just women -- we did our best to offer financial
assistance to *anyone* that asked (even if it was just a small
amount). This brought in attendees from India, Argentina, and beyond.

8) Talks: People learn in different ways. Some people get a lot out of
listening to talks, others need a more hands-on approach. We had 5
minute lightning talks, 20 minute talks, 45 minute talks, tutorials
(hours long), and sprints (two days, totally hands-on, open source
work). I wish we had had more tutorials. Two 20 minute talks with a 5
minute setup break in between worked out well for us. It meant both
tracks had breaks at the same time (20min + 20min + 5min = 45min). We
encouraged attendees to commit to both 20 minute talks in the 45
minute window, and tried to make sure we paired 20 minute talks that
complimented each other. The 5 minute and 20 minute talks also proved
to be a good way to increase the diversity of the conference. People
who were intimidated at the prospect of giving a 45 minute talk and
would have otherwise said no to us, were more easily convinced to
speak when given shorter talk options. First time speakers, students,
people new to Python, speakers who's first language wasn't English,
were just some of the people these shorter talk slots appealed to.

9) Lightning Talks: We confirmed our lightning talks in advance just
like normal 20 minute and 45 minute talks. Note that PyCon USA does
not do this. At PyCon USA, there is a lottery for who gets to give
lightning talks once everyone is already at PyCon. We decided to
confirm the talks in advance so that a) we were sure people knew what
made a good lightning talk b) so that we had lightning talks - I was
terrified we'd have dead air time c) because lightning talks have
become really popular at PyCon USA and I found that people were really
disappointed when their name didn't end up being drawn; especially
after having spent the time preparing the content and slides d) to
increase the diversity of speakers.

10) Conference Site: We decided to build our own conference website.
In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. And totally my fault (I
felt like building something just for fun), but running a PyCon has
very little to do with code: it's management, management, management.
And email, *so* much email. You'll have enough to worry about, as it
is. If I were to do it over again, I probably would have used the same
code PyCon USA uses (https://github.com/pinax/symposion).

And I could go on and on... it was such an incredible learning experience.

I apologize if this email isn't very clear -- it was written very
quickly. I should follow-up with "10 things we did wrong" ;)

Feel free to ping me with questions.

Good luck!

--diana

PyCon Canada 2012 Chair

On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 4:37 PM, Juan Luis Cano Rodríguez
<juanlu001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello everybody, my name is Juan Luis Cano, I am an engineering student
> passionate about Python and I am willing to organize the first PyCon in my
> country, Spain.
>
> Actually it is not the first time someone comes up with this, but in the end
> the people get tired and this never gets done. I am too enthusiastic, I have
> been diving into the Python ecosystem more and more and I have the means to
> achive this goal.
>
> We are thinking of stablishing a formal association country-wide, but if it
> is too much of a mess we will try to rely on existing non-profit
> organizations to organize the event.
>
> We expect around 200 people, will to set 2 tracks (basic and advanced) and
> we intend to celebrate the conference by october-november 2013.
>
> Someone actually had contacted the PSF before so we already have the
> es.pycon.org domain ready for hosting a promotion website.
>
> We are already promoting the upcoming event on Twitter (@Pybonacci,
> @pycon_es) and working in the mailing list python-es.
>
> I will read carefully the advice given to others in this mailing list (just
> not to repeat the same questions), but any kind of help will be much
> appreciated.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Juan Luis Cano
>
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