Calendar¶

Cardiff University¶

We have access to the following rooms:

• Main lecture hall (capacity 170)
• 053 (capacity 82)
• 140 (capacity 72)
• 150 (capacity 72)
• 232 (capacity 71)
• 228 (capacity 52, has movable chairs)

Cardiff City Hall¶

We have access to the following rooms:

• Assembly Room
• Marble Hall
• Lower Hall
• Ferrier Hall
• Syndicate Rooms A, B, C, D, G, H

See here for more about the capacities of each room.

We have provisionally allocated Syndicate Rooms C and D for the teachers’ day on Friday, and the childrens’ day on Saturday.

Refunding tickets¶

We will offer a full refund on tickets until 1st September, and a 50% refund thereafter.

To refund a ticket from the Tito admin interface:

• Click “Orders”, search for the ticket-holder’s name
• Click “Cancel this order”
• Click “Yes” when asked if you’re sure
• Click “Refund via Stripe”

Upgrading tickets¶

We allow people to upgrade their tickets through their purchase of a Ticket Upgrade ticket.

To process a Ticket Upgrade via the Tito admin interface, you find the original ticket, update its type, and then void the Ticket Upgrade. In detail:

• Click “Attendees”
• Find the relevant Ticket Upgrade ticket * Tickets can be filtered by type if required * This should have the number of the original ticket that needs to be upgraded
• Find the original ticket via its ticket number
• Click “Edit attendee details”
• Change the ticket type appropriately
• Add “upgraded” as a tag
• Save the ticket
• Find the Ticket Upgrade ticket again
• Click “Void ticket”, then “Confirm void”, then “No” (in answer to the question about refunds)

Sponsorship levels¶

We’re offering sponsorship at the following levels:

• Gold, £9,995, includes ten tickets and a fifteen-minute sponsored keynote slot
• Silver, £4,995, includes five tickets and a five-minute sponsored lightning talk slot
• Bronze, £1,995, includes two tickets

All sponsors will be eligible to have a booth in the Marble Hall from Friday to Monday and take part in the jobs fair.

We will promote all sponsors on social media and in the conference newsletter, and will place sponsor logos on our website and on signs around the conference venue. We will also make space in the conference booklet for advertisements from sponsors.

Process for contacting potential sponsors¶

All conference organisers are encouraged to contact potential sponsors!

There is a spreadsheet for tracking the progress with contacting sponsors in the conference Google Drive shared folder. Please let Peter or George know if you don’t have access to this.

If you see a company in the spreadsheet where you know somebody who works there (particularly if the status is “no response” or “stale”) please let the person in the handler field know.

Feel free to claim any companies where the handler field is blank by filling out this field.

If you are listed as the handler for a company, please keep the the spreadsheet up to date!

The spreadsheet has the following columns:

Sponsor

The name of the company.

Handler

The name of the person in contact with the company.

Contact

The name of our contact(s) at the company.

Email

Email address for our contact.

Address

Address of the company (for invoicing purposes).

Level

The level of sponsorship (one of gold/silver/bronze). This can be filled in before sponsorship is agreed.

Amount

The amount of sponsorship agreed – this will usually correspond to the amounts under Sponsorship levels. This should be only be filled in once sponsorship is agreed.

Extra

Anything about the sponsorship that we’ll need to bear in mind when putting on the conference, such as “the sponsors are only coming to the jobs fair”, or “the sponsors have requested that we promote their latest campaign”.

Last contact

Date of last contact with company.

Status

See below.

Notes

Any notes about ongoing discussion – use this as you see fit.

The status field may be one of the following:

TODO

The company has not yet been contacted.

Contacted

The company has been contacted, and discussions are ongoing.

No response

The company has been contacted, and no meaningful response has been received.

Stale

The company has been contacted, but discussions have petered out.

Declined

The company has been contacted, and has declined to sponsor the conference.

Invoice required

The company has agreed to sponsor the conference, and an invoice is required.

Invoiced

The company has agreed to sponsor the conference, and an invoice has been sent.

Paid

The company have paid to sponsor the conference.

Do not contact

The company should not be contacted.

Invoicing¶

Once sponsorship has been agreed with a company, please contact Kristian, who will arrange for an invoice to be sent to the company.

Tickets sold¶

Here is a breakdown of the number of tickets sold for main conference:

Regular tickets were available until 1/7/15, after which Full Price tickets were available.

Community tickets were supposed to be for those who spoke or who volunteered their time during or before the conference, and were limited in number. Additional Speaker tickets were released after these had been sold. The process for this was pretty unclear, and several speakers ended up paying higher rates without knowing that a lower rate was available.

Student/Unwaged tickets were given to those who applied for them. I’m not quite sure how this was handled.

Several sponsors were eligible for free tickets.

Additionally, here are the other tickets:

This data came from ti.to.

Sponsorship¶

Here’s a breakdown of the sponsorship received:

• 1 × £10,000
• 4 × £5,000
• 2 × £2,500
• 8 × £1,000
• 1 × £500

PyCon UK 2015¶

At PyCon UK 2015, we had approximately 70 talks.

About 57 of the speakers were male, and the vast majority were white. Historically, we have not done as well as we could in attracting proposals from beyond this easy-to-find constituency of speakers.

Target¶

Our target at this PyCon is to receive at least one-third of our talk proposals from women, and a substantial improvement in the representation of other PyCon minorities amongst the talk applicants.

This is not impossible to achieve, by any means.

PyCon US:

• 2011: about 1% of speakers were women
• 2014 and 2015: about one-third were women

DjangoCon Europe:

• 2014: two our of 32 speakers were women
• 2105: approximately one-third of speakers were women
• 2016: approximately one-half of speakers are women

It’s less easy to put numbers to other under-represented groups.

How to meet this target¶

To achieve the numbers we’re aiming for, we will need to encourage people in under-represented groups to submit more talks.

Specifically, this will involve (all of these things have been tried, tested and successful):

• having published diversity and accessibility policies
• making a big deal of the fact that we want a more diverse speaker line-up
• asking particular people to submit proposals
• making it clear that speakers who require financial assistance can expect to receive it
• setting up a speaker mentor scheme to help speakers who’d like it
• providing and advertising a quiet room at the event
• providing and advertising a crèche
• providing and advertising speech-to-text transcription (may depend on budget)
• stressing that PyCon will be an oaf-free-zone, and that the code of conduct will be taken very seriously
• making it clear that attendee well-being matters (for example)

Pricing¶

DNS¶

Each year’s website has a subdomain under pyconuk.org (eg 2016.pyconuk.org) with a matching repo in our GitHub organisation.

DNSimple is configured with a CNAME for each year hosted on GitHub Pages (2015 onwards). URL records have been set up to redirect pyconuk.org and www.pyconuk.org to the appropriate year subdomain.

Years prior to 2015 have A records pointing them to a server kindly hosted by Zeth.

Passwords¶

Account passwords are currently in a 1Password vault that only George has access to. This needs to be improved.

Website Deployment¶

The website can be built and deployed locally by running make deploy. However this is not ideal when using a Pull Request workflow since it requires someone to have a working environment and thus TravisCI has been set up to deploy changes made to master.

For more details on this see the website readme.

Slack¶

See the Slack howto guide.

GitHub Permissions¶

Owners are:

• Charlie
• Cory
• George
• Kristian
• Owen
• Peter

Two main teams:

• Core: Basically everyone
• pydata: PyData related folk

Goals of Financial Aid¶

The goal of the PyCon UK financial aid program is to ensure that PyCon UK’s delegates and speakers reflect the broader Python community, both in the UK and the world. The Python community is a diverse one, and one of the ways this diversity manifests itself is in a diversity of financial background. Restricting attendance to only those who can pay their own way or who can have their attendance funded by their employer necessarily leads to a conference that is not representative of the wider community.

This means that it is important that we enable both delegates and speakers who would otherwise be unable to attend the conference to attend. The easiest way to do this is with direct grants for financial aid, which can come in various forms. Some of these are fairly classic: direct grants of money, subsidised/free tickets, paid-for accommodation. Some of these are more unusual: funding childcare facilities or having a child-friendly policy, for example.

All of these ideas are in service to the goal that, wherever possible, people who would like to attend PyCon UK 2016 are empowered to attend PyCon UK 2016, regardless of their personal circumstances. Ours is a community of inclusion: applying a financial test for membership runs counter to our principles.

To put this more concretely we have two goals:

1. Obtain a wide variety of speakers. Speakers are an important resource for PyCon UK, and it should be noted that they do a large amount of unfunded work in order to present. We should enable a wide variety of speakers at PyCon UK, and while we should aim for many of them to be local, we should also endeavour to find some speakers from further afield. Those speakers in particular will likely need financial assistance for travel.
2. Obtain a wide variety of delegates. Again, our primary focus should be enabling potential delegates from the UK and Europe to attend. However, substantial value is obtained by having delegates from further afield attend, and money should be set aside to assist in their travel.

I’ll break down my proposed approaches for those two groups below.

One thing I am explicitly excluding from this discussion is teachers and the teacher track. This is because historically our funding for teachers has come entirely out of the grant from BAML. My expectation is that this will continue, and that the BAML grant will be entirely earmarked for the teacher track and will not touch the financial aid budget. I’m happy to work with Carrie-Anne on integrating the teacher applications into the same forms etc. as the financial aid stuff, but I don’t expect it to affect my budget at all.

Expenses: Travel, Accommodation, and Other¶

Historically, other PyCons have required itemised breakdowns of these costs. However, many financial aid coordinators in other conferences are coming to the view that this represents unacceptable administrative overhead, and I’m inclined to agree with them. It is generally unwise for us to make anyone, attendees or the committee, categorise expenses. Instead, we should assume that delegates have a good understanding of how to cover their costs.

This means that we’ll ask delegates to apply for a flat sum of money to put towards their expenses. We will make it clear to delegates that the lower this number is the more likely it is that their grant will be accepted in full: for larger sums of money we’re likely to make partial grants rather than full ones. This works because partial grants are more likely to be useful than no grant at all, especially for those travelling from overseas. LVH has suggested a ‘flood fill’ algorithm for funding grants[2], which I think will be useful here.

For the sake of accommodation, we will also volunteer to put financial aid applicants in contact with one another for the purposes of arranging shared accommodation. We will make it clear that sharing accommodation will likely reduce costs, which makes their grant request smaller and more likely to be granted. We will also allow grant applicants to specify constraints on who they’d like to share accommodation with (for obvious reasons).

To be clear: we will not be asking attendees to account for their spending. We will not demand receipts. We will ask for them to return any unspent funds, but I expect that we won’t have much, especially if we tend to partially fulfil grants. It’s my belief that the money saved by undertaking this work does not justify the a) increased workload on volunteers, and b) the feeling of grant recipients that they are being policed and distrusted.

It may be sensible to say that anyone who applies for financial aid, regardless of the success of their application, should be offered a reduced-price ticket. I haven’t decided if we should pursue that direction or not yet, and feedback would be welcome here.

Process¶

Limited By Guarantee¶

IANAL etc. but expect everyone you deal with officially (mostly banks) to assume “Ltd.” -> “Limited by Share Capital”. We do not have share capital, we’re Limited By Guarantee.

Non-Profit¶

In formal legal terms, we’re a straight-forward vanilla company. There’s nothing special in our articles, we’re not a charity, we don’t have anything like a Community Interest Company asset lock.

Just being a legal entity is a dramatic improvement over what we were, involving a fair bit of paperwork. Any further improvements can come later.

However in spirit we’re non-profit; nobody’s drawing any kind of salary, the goal is for all money to be spent on “the promotion of Python in the UK” etc., and this is enough to count for e.g. a Barclays Community account.

TL;DR: We’re non-profit in spirit but not in law; be clear if asked, because “in spirit” is often good enough.