IRC Meeting #7

Time/Location

The meeting will take place on Monday 23rd of April (2007-04-23) 18:00 CEST (17:00 BST, 16:00 UTC/GMT) in the #europython channel on freenode.net. That's 5pm UK time, 6pm in most of Western Europe. The suggested duration of the meeting is at most one hour.

Minutes

• David will contact Kit Blake about getting Simon Willison to give a keynote (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/europython/2007-April/006317.html). Update: David contacted Simon directly to discuss the possibility of this.

• Bea will review the Agile and Social Skills theme description (EuroPython/2007/TrackDescriptions).

• Laura will ask about PyCon's sponsorship packages.

• Harald posted information about sponsorship to the mailing list. Further discussion about sponsorship details will continue there.

• Information about sponsorship and attendance fees were posted.
• Harald mentioned that the information about accommodation and food costs needs to be clarified.
  • Budgets for 2005 and 2006 would be useful to the EP 2007 organisers.

  • Work on the fee structure will be carried out on the mailing list. See /EuroPython/2007/FeeStructure for a comparison between fees and sponsorship prices in previous years.

• David will think about coercing one of his colleagues into looking over press releases.

Agenda

Suggestions:

• Deciding on the keynote speakers.
• Finishing the theme descriptions for use in Indico: "education" and "social skills" are missing; "agile" needs reviewing; suggestions welcome about the others.
• Promotion:

  • Status of contacts: ZEA (Nicolas), Python411 (David), Python Papers article. Going through the list on the EuroPython/2007/PublicRelations page to work out what's left to do.

• Sponsorship/finance:
  • Contact points: revitalising the europython-sponsorship mailing list and providing a sponsorship at europython.org address.
  • Participation of Google (Michael), other previous sponsors (Benedikt or Michael).

  • Ideas about sponsorship packages/levels, rates, facilities: see Aiste's message for details.

  • Look at the financial plan to get ideas of sponsorship rates (Nicolas). A general idea of budgetary constraints is needed: attendee rates should be decided, too.
  • Clarify use of Web banners for sponsors, and discuss "attendee bag" advertising, including programmes and other promotional materials.

• Opening times: see Aiste's message for details.

• What materials will be given to attendees? At CERN, it was vital to give people maps and site information (as well as badges). See this message about The Python Papers on the topic of "bag inserts".

Notes

The issue of promotion isn't a problem at this stage. The things that need to be decided are mostly to do with finance and, by extension, sponsorship. If there's a formula to use to decide how much sponsors will be charged and how much attendees will pay, we need to start assigning values to some of the variables as soon as possible.

We also really need to clarify the themes - this means sorting out the missing theme descriptions - and decide on keynote speakers.

See the calendar to get an idea of where we should be at this point in time.