In March 2020, we had to make a tough decision on whether to cancel EuroPython 2020 or run it online. Since we did not want to lose continuity and all the work we had already put into the in-person event, we decided to go for an online version.

Now, just as many other in-person events, running the online version required a lot of research, experimentation, gaining knowledge in using online conference tools and finding a concept which would allow us to carry over as much of the in-person conference experience to the online version as possible.

This is an on-going effort, but we believe that our existing research will help other Python events go online as well and want to share this knowledge with you.

Running Online Conferences

The two central documents we have are:

• EuroPython 2020 - Online Conference Tools
  This covers research on a lot of different tools available out there, our experience with them, hints and tips on how to use them effectively (esp. for Zoom and Discord).
  
  
• EuroPython 2020 - Virtual Conference Concept
  Since we had to start afresh with the conference concept, we ran and still are running a brainstorming phase to come up with ideas and are now starting to materialize these into a concept, which we’ll use as basis for running EuroPython this year.

If you have questions around these documents and their content, feel free to contact us at helpdesk@europython.eu.

Sharing our Zoom Webinar and Pro licenses

In addition to sharing our research, we’d also like to share the Zoom Webinar and Pro licenses we have with other events, where possible (*). We have already shared them with:

• PyAmsterdam
• Remote Python Pizza

The only thing we ask is that some of our work group members can participate in the event as co-host to observe and help, since we need to train and gain more experience in using these tools. As a bonus, we can also help with the configuration and share our existing experience.

If you’re interested in this, please get in contact with us at helpdesk@europython.eu.

(*) We can make the Webinar and Pro licenses available in May and June. In July we need to setup and prepare for EP2020.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2020 Team
https://ep2020.europython.eu/
https://www.europython-society.org/

europython:

We have started the EuroPython 2020 online conference & sprint ticket sales today.

https://ep2020.europython.eu/registration/buy-tickets/

Simplified ticket structure

In order to keep things simple for the EuroPython 2020 online version, we have significantly reduced the ticket prices and refactored the ticket structure to just two ticket types and two categories:

Conference & sprint tickets

The conference & sprint ticket includes admission to the EuroPython 2020 main conference (July 23-24) and sprints days (July 25-26).

• Business conference ticket: EUR 175.00 incl. 0% Swedish VAT
  (for people using Python to make a living)
• Personal conference ticket: EUR 95.00 incl. 0% Swedish VAT
  (for people enjoying Python in their free time or as a freelancer)

Sprint-only tickets

Admission to the sprint days (July 25-26) is free of charge, but we still require you to register and “buy” tickets, since that way we can send out the conference details using our ticketing system:

• Business sprint ticket: EUR 0.00 incl. 0% Swedish VAT
  (for people using Python to make a living)
• Personal sprint ticket: EUR 0.00 incl. 0% Swedish VAT
  (for people enjoying Python in their free time or as a freelancer)

Full details

Please see our registration page for full details on the available tickets.

As a reminder, here’s the conference structure:

• Thursday & Friday, July 23 & 24:
  Conference talks, keynotes & virtual exhibition
  
• Saturday & Sunday, July 25 & 26:
  Sprints

Participate in Talk Voting

With conference tickets, you will also be able to participate in the talk voting which is still available until Sunday, April 26 23:59:59 CEST. Talk voting is your chance to tell us what you’d like to see at EuroPython 2020.

Sprints-only tickets are not eligible for talk voting, but if you have bought a ticket for one of the previous EuroPython conferences, you can still vote after logging in to the website.

Guido van Rossum Core Developer Grant

For Python Core Developers, we have put a special grant in place, which will allow core developers to get free tickets to the conference.

If you want to sign up, please check our grant page for details on how to apply.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2020 Team
https://ep2020.europython.eu/
https://www.europython-society.org/

We received the very sad news today, that Oier Echaniz Beneitez has passed away, after a long-term illness (not as a result of COVID-19).

Oier was one of the initiators for bringing EuroPython to Bilbao in 2015 and co-chaired the conference in both 2015 and 2016, together with Fabio:

Oier giving the EuroPython 2015 welcome speech together with Fabio Pliger

He was one of the most enthusiastic and engaged organizers of the conference, served on the EuroPython Society board from 2015 - 2017 and founded and chaired the local Python organization in San Sebastian (PySS, pronounced “peace”). Oier also started the pyjok.es project, together with Alexandre Savio and Ben Nuttall, inaugurating the first Python Jokes-as-a-Service of its kind.

His humour and friendly approach to everything, even when things turned bad on him, were inspiring and created a great atmosphere for everyone who worked with him. Oier’s love for pyntxos was famous and I’m sure all of you who attended the EuroPython conferences in Bilbao will never forget.

“Oier was an exceptionally funny guy with a wonderful sense of humour. He was kind, caring and considerate, and worked hard for PySS and EuroPython. I have fond, happy memories of any time I spent with him and know he’ll be greatly missed.” — Ben Nuttall

“Oier put so much enthusiasm in everything we did, in our first quests together and then doing all the activities of ACPySS. He was not only an active member of the Python community but also very involved in the local cancer research and care community. We knew his end was going to come sooner rather than later, and these last 2 years have been quite harsh on him. His amazing will to live was what kept him going for so long and we are sure that the Python community motivated him to keep on. Rest in PySS, my friend.” — Alexandre Savio

Our good friend: We’ll miss you!

May the good vibes and pyntxos always be with you.

Thank you for all the good times,
–
Your friends from the EuroPython community

europython:

In the last two weeks, we have discussed and investigated concepts around running this year’s EuroPython conference as an online conference. We have looked at conference tools, your feedback, drafted up ideas on what we can do to make the event interesting and what we can accomplish given our limited resources.

Today, we are happy to announce that we will be running

EuroPython 2020
from July 23 - 26 2020
as an online conference

We are planning the following structure:

• 2 conference days with keynotes, talks, lightning talks, poster session
  (Thursday and Friday)

• 2 sprint days with multiple sprint teams
  (Saturday and Sunday)

Attending the conference days will require a ticket, participating in the sprint days will be free.

We will publish additional information on the new format as it becomes available. A few updates for today (more details will follow in separate blog posts):

Call for Papers (CFP)

With the new plan in place, we will extend and retarget the CFP we had been running in the last three weeks to the online setup.

Please note that we will not have training sessions at EuroPython 2020. We will have keynotes, 30 and 45-minute talks, panels, interactive sessions, as well as try to come up with a format for doing posters and lightning talks.

Unlike for our in-person event, speakers will get free tickets to the event, since we don’t have to cover catering costs.

We need your help

Given that we had already put a lot of work into the in-person event organization, a lot of which we’ll now have to adapt or redo for the online set up in the few months ahead of us, we will need more help from the community to make this happen.

If you would like to help, please write to board@europython.eu. We are specifically looking for people with experience using online conference tools to help host tracks during the conference days.

Sponsoring

As for the in-person event, we will have sponsorship packages available for the online event as well. Because the format is different, we’ll have to adjust the packages we had intended for the in-person to an online setup.

If you are interested in sponsoring EuroPython 2020, please write to sponsoring@europython.eu. We will then send you more details, as they become available.

Thanks,
–
EuroPython 2020 Team
https://ep2020.europython.eu/
https://www.europython-society.org/

After a work intense RFP over two months with more than 40 venues competing, 18 first round entries, and two rounds of refinements, we are now happy to announce the winner:

EuroPython 2020 will be held at the CCD in 
Dublin, Ireland, from July 20 - 26 2020

We will now start work on the contracts and get the organization going, so that we can all enjoy another edition of EuroPython next year.

Many thanks,
–
EuroPython Society Board
https://www.europython-society.org/

We are happy to announce that we have started the RFP for venues to host the EuroPython 2020 conference.

We have sent out the details to more than 40 venues.

Like last year, we also want to give the chance to other venues who were not on our list to participate in the RFP. For this purpose, we are making the details available in this blog post as well.

RFP Introduction

The EuroPython Society is the organization behind the EuroPython conference, the largest Python programming language conference in Europe, with more than 1100 professionals from IT, science and educational fields attending to learn about new developments, network and learn from experience of others in the field.

Python is a very popular open source programming language, with a large following in the web development and data science fields.

EuroPython was initiated in 2002, with the first conference in Charleroi, Belgium, and has since toured Europe for a total of 18 editions so far. For EuroPython 2020 we are looking for a new location and venue and are reaching out to potential venues.

If you’d like to participate in this process, please have a look at the RFP spreadsheet in form of an Excel spreadsheet with a quote section and list of questions, as well as our EuroPython 2019 sponsor brochure with more details about the conference, the demographics and our offerings for sponsors, to give you an idea of what we are looking for.

Please see the first tab in the spreadsheet for a description of the submission process. If you have questions, please write to board@europython.eu.

Update 2019-09-21:
We have answered the questions received by a number of vendors in the first round and put the answers into a new first round answers spreadsheet.

You can also check these other resources:

• EuroPython 2019 website: https://ep2019.europython.eu/en/
  
• EuroPython videos: http://europython.tv/
  
• EuroPython pictures: https://www.flickr.com/groups/europython2019/
  
• EuroPython blog: http://blog.europython.eu/
  
• EuroPython Twitter channel: https://twitter.com/europython
  
• EuroPython Society: http://www.europython-society.org/
  

Timeline

This is the timeline for the RFP:

First round:

• Start of RFP process: 2019-09-09
  
• Deadline for RFP vendor questions: 2019-09-16
  
• Vendor questions answered by: 2019-09-20
  
• First round submission deadline: 2019-09-27
  
• Second round candidates will be informed until: 2019-10-07
  

Second round:

• Second round RFP questions posted: 2019-10-13
• Deadline for RFP vendor questions: 2019-10-16
• Vendor questions answered by: 2019-10-20
• Final submission deadline: 2019-10-25
• Final candidate will be informed until: 2019-10-30
  

RFP Resources

• EuroPython 2019 sponsor brochure
  
• First round RFP spreadsheet
  
• First round vendor questions and answers spreadsheet
• RFP submission form for uploading the filled in spreadsheet and any additional documents, you may want to provide

Many thanks,
– 
EuroPython Society Board
https://www.europython-society.org/

For those of you who were not at EuroPython 2019, we’re happy to announce our new board for the next term:

• Anders Hammarquist (Treasurer)
  
• Angel Ramboi
  
• Jakub Musko
  
• Marc-André Lemburg (Chair)
  
• Martin Christen (Vice Chair)
  
• Raquel Dou
  
• Silvia Uberti
  
• Stéphane Wirtel
  

Together, we’ll head off into the EuroPython 2020 RFP process next month and then kick off planning next year’s conference.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython Society

At this year’s EuroPython Society General Assembly we will vote in a new board of the EuroPython Society for the term 2019/2020.

List of Board Candidates

The EPS bylaws require one chair and 2 - 8 board members. The following candidates have stated their willingness to work on the EPS board. We are presenting them here (in alphabetical order by surname).

Prof. Martin Christen

Teaching Python / using Python for research projects

Martin Christen is a professor of Geoinformatics and Computer Graphics at the Institute of Geomatics at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). His main research interests are geospatial Virtual- and Augmented Reality, 3D geoinformation, and interactive 3D maps.
Martin is very active in the Python community. He teaches various Python-related courses and uses Python in most research projects. He organizes the PyBasel meetup - the local Python User Group Northwestern Switzerland. He also organizes the yearly GeoPython conference. He is a board member of the Python Software Verband e.V.

I would be glad to help with EuroPython, to be part of a great team that makes the next edition of EuroPython even better, wherever it will hosted.

Raquel Dou

Linguist / Python enthusiast

Raquel befriended Python in 2013, during her MSc in Evolution of Language and Cognition, where she used Python to model a simple communication system’s evolution over time. She runs a business providing language services and often uses Python to make her work and life easier and more fun.

She was an onsite volunteer in 2018 when EuroPython took place at her doorstep (Edinburgh), and has since been helping with preparations for the 2019 conference in the support and sponsor workgroups.

Anders Hammarquist

Pythonista / Consultant / Software architect

Anders brought Python to Open End (née Strakt), a Python software company
focusing on data organization, when we founded it in 2001. He has used
Python in various capacities since 1995.

He helped organize EuroPython 2004 and 2005, and has attended and given
talks at several EuroPythons since then. He has handled the Swedish financials of the EuroPython Society since 2016 and has served as board member since 2017.

Marc-André Lemburg

Pythonista / CEO / Consultant / Coach

Marc-Andre is the CEO and founder of eGenix.com, a Python-focused project and consulting company based in Germany. He has a degree in mathematics from the University of Düsseldorf. His work with and for Python started in 1994. He became Python Core Developer in 1997, designed and implemented the Unicode support in Python and continued to maintain the Python Unicode implementation for more than a decade. Marc-Andre is a founding member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and has served on the PSF Board several times.

In 2002, Marc-Andre was on the executive committee to run the first EuroPython conference in Charleroi, Belgium. He also co-organized the second EuroPython 2003 conference. Since then, he has attended every single EuroPython conference and continued being involved in the workings of the conference organization.

He was elected as board member of the EuroPython Society (EPS) in 2012 and enjoyed the last few years working with the EPS board members on steering the EuroPython conference to the new successful EuroPython Workgroup structures to sustain the continued growth, while maintaining the EuroPython spirit and fun aspect of the conference.

For the EuroPython 2017, 2018 and 2019 editions, Marc-Andre was chair of the EuroPython Society and ran lots of activities around the conference organization, e.g. managing the contracts and budget, helping with sponsors,  the website, setting up the conference app, writing blog posts and many other things that were needed to make EuroPython happen.

Going forward, he would like to intensify work on turning the EPS into an organization which aids the Python adoption in Europe not only by running the EuroPython conference, but also by help build organizer networks and provide financial help to other Python conferences in Europe.

Silvia Uberti

Sysadmin / IT Consultant

She is a Sysadmin with a degree in Network Security, really passionate about technology, traveling and her piano.  

She’s an advocate for women in STEM disciplines and supports inclusiveness of underrepresented people in tech communities.

She fell in love with Python and its warm community during PyCon Italia in 2014 and became a member of EuroPython Sponsor Workgroup in 2017.  
She enjoys a lot working in it and wants to help more!

What does the EPS Board do ?

The EPS board runs the day-to-day business of the EuroPython Society, including running the EuroPython conference events. It is allowed to enter contracts for the society and handle any issues that have not been otherwise regulated in the bylaws or by the General Assembly. Most business is handled by email on the board mailing list or the board’s Telegram group, board meetings are usually run as conference calls.

It is important to note that the EPS board is an active board, i.e. the board members are expected to put in a significant amount of time and effort towards the goals of the EPS and for running the EuroPython conference. This usually means at least 100-200h work over a period of one year, with most of this being needed in the last six months before the conference. Many board members put in even more work to make sure that the EuroPython conferences become a success.

Board members are generally expected to take on leadership roles within the EuroPython Workgroups.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython Society

We would like to invite all EuroPython attendees and EuroPython Society (EPS) members to attend this year’s EPS General Assembly (GA), which we will run as in-person meeting at the upcoming EuroPython 2019, held in Basel, Switzerland from July 8 - 14.

Place of the General Assembly meeting:

We will meet on Thursday, July 11 2019, at 16:05 CEST in room Boston of the Congress Center Basel, Messeplatz 21, 4058 Basel, Switzerland.

There will be a short talk to invite volunteers to participate in organizing EuroPython 2019 in preparation for next year’s event at 15:30 CEST in the same room, right before the General Assembly. You may want to attend that talk as well. In this talk, we will present the EuroPython Workgroup Concept, we have been using successfully for the past years now.

General Assembly Agenda

The agenda contents for the assembly is defined by the EPS bylaws. We are planning to use the following structure:

• Opening of the meeting
• Selection of meeting chair, secretary and 2 checkers of the minutes
• Motion establishing the timeliness of the call to the meeting
• Presentation of the annual report and annual accounts by the board
• Presentation of the report of the auditor
• Discharge from liability for the board
• Presentation of a budget by the outgoing board.
• Acceptance of budget and decision on membership fees for the upcoming year
• Election of members of the board
• Election of chair of the board
• Election of one auditor and one replacement. The auditor does not have to be certified in any way and is normally selected among the members of the society.
• The optional election of a nomination committee for the next annual meeting of the General Assembly
• Propositions from the board, if any
  
• Motions from the members, if any
  
• Closing of the meeting

In an effort to reduce the time it takes to go through this long list, which is mandated by the bylaws, we will try to send as much information to the members mailing list before the GA, so that we can limit presentations to a minimum.

Election of the members of the board

The EPS bylaws limit the number of board members to one chair and 2 - 8 directors, at most 9 directors in total. Experience has shown that the board members are the most active organizers of the EuroPython conference, so we try to get as many board members as possible to spread the work load.

All members of the EPS are free to nominate or self nominate board members. Please write to board@europython-society.org no later than Thursday, July 4 2019, if you want to run for board. We will then include you in the list we’ll have in the final nomination announcement before the GA, which is scheduled for July 5.

The following people from the current board have already shown interest in running for board in the next term as well (in alphabetical order):

• Martin Christen
• Silvia Uberti
• Anders Hammarquist
• Marc-André Lemburg

We will post more detailed information about the candidates and any new nominations we receive in a separate blog post.

Propositions from the board

• None at the moment.
  

The bylaws allow for additional propositions to be announced up until 5 days before the GA, so the above list is not necessarily the final list.

Motions from the members

• None at the moment.
  

EPS members are entitled to suggest motions to be voted on at the GA. The bylaws require any such motions to be announced at least 5 days before the GA. If you would like to propose a motion, please send it to board@europython-society.org no later than Friday, July 4 2019, so we can announce the final list to everyone.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython Society

europython:

We are pleased to announce the EuroPython 2019 schedule. We will again have more than 130 sessions in total, held by more than 130 speakers. 

Schedule for EuroPython 2019

Please note that the schedule may still change in details, but the overall layout is fixed now.

Book your EuroPython 2019 Ticket

Please make sure you book your ticket in the coming days. We will switch to late bird rates next week.

If you want to attend the training sessions, please buy a training pass in addition to your conference ticket, or get a combined ticket. We only have very few training seats left.

Travel & accommodation tips

Since we’re close the conference, Basel is in high demand. If you’re having problems finding a hotel, please also consider searching for apartments on the well known booking sites.

We have collected a number of recommendations for accommodation and travel to Basel on the EuroPython 2019 website. If you get a hotel or apartment in Basel, you will additionally get a BaselCard for your stay, which allows you to use public transport in Basel for free. Please see our accommodation page for details.

Enjoy,
–
EuroPython 2019 Team
https://ep209.europython.eu/  
https://www.europython-society.org/