[EuroPython] Voting proposals

[Martijn Faassen]

Laura Creighton wrote:
> But the biggest source of my dissatisfaction in organising both EP02 AND 03
> is that it was seen as a company thing.  something that denis and his
> company (QUICK -- who can remember its name)  did for us.
> 
> I am extremely sick of this model.
> 
> I want EP 2004 be something we do for ourselves.
> Wherever we hold it.

Actually this perception seems to have only arisen on this mailing list
after EPC 2003. I think this is mostly a misperception.

EuroPython has been organized by two entities:

  * P3B, a non-profit organization of Belgian Python users. Denis is heavily
    involved in this.

  * The EuroPython on and offline community. That includes lots of people
    who helped with the website, the track chairs, people worrying about
    press releases, and so on.

The groups are connected in real life: in late '01, leading up to the first 
EPC conference, several of us were in Charleroi and at a P3B meeting
ourselves. And of course we met at the two conferences itself.

EuroPython from the beginning has been a community organized conference.
That the perception now exists that it was not is disheartening to me because
one of the reasons to kick off EuroPython for me was to move away from
that!

There had been a number of Zope BBQ events in Berlin. They were fun
and succesful, but organized by one company, BeeHive. It was not looking
like they'd open the process up and make it a community-organized
event, which I thought was unfortunate. As some of you may recall I mentioned
this at the time in my emails to some of the people in the Zope community.

In fact I think overall we've been succesful, and Laura's impression is
an inaccurate perception based on some of the recent discussions here.
Some people were saying we should be grateful to Aragne as they did
a lot of work in organizing this conference (and that's why we should
have them do it again). It is true we should be grateful to Aragne. It
invested a lot into this conference.

It's not the only company which had some of their people invest time
in the conference however. Many of the speakers may have been sponsored
in part by their organizations, letting them come and speak at our
conference and perhaps their travel expenses. Infrae (my own company) 
sponsored my own involvement (i.e. I spent less time doing paid customer work).

(For Infrae, our investment in time has been repaid massively even
by EPC 2002. We therefore shouldn't be *that* grateful to Infrae. :)

> This is a community conference which the community of Göteborg. i.e
> lots of people not in Strakt -- want to hold here -- because we want to
> do this.  

That is of course an excellent thing to hear. It's however not better 
(or worse) than the Charleroi events of '02 and '03. Which doesn't mean
that's still great to put extra emphasis on the fact that it's also
the case for Göteborg.

Regards,

Martijn