Over the last couple of weeks, we have worked with our designer Jessica Peña to come up with a logo which reflects both our desire to come together online during the pandemic and shows how well our community is interconnected around the world.
We will soon make EuroPython 2021 merchandise available with the new logo in our EuroPython merch shop, so you can order t-shirts, sweatshirts, caps and mugs to show your support and love for the conference.
This year's conference will mark the 20th edition of the EuroPython conference.
Since we started touring Europe in 2002 in Charleroi, Belgium, we have come a long way. The conference has grown from the initial 240 to around 1200-1400 attendees every year. The organization had started with a small group of people in a somewhat ad-hoc way and has now grown into a well structured team backed by the non-profit EuroPython Society (EPS), while still keeping the fun spirit of the early days.
EuroPython 2002 was the first major all volunteer run event for Python. A lot of other conferences have since emerged in Europe and we're actively trying to help them wherever we can, with our grants program, growing conference knowledge base and our Organizers' Lunch, for which we regularly invite representatives of all European Python conferences to get together to network, exchange experience in organizing events community building and understand how we can most effectively help each other.
To celebrate the anniversary, we took a deep look into our archives and have put together live website copies of the last few years, going back all the way to EP2009, which was held in Birmingham, UK. For previous years, archive.org stored some pages of the websites, so let's do a quick tour of 20 years of EuroPython:
Update 2021-03-06: The call for volunteers is closed now. Many thanks to all the volunteers who signed up ! We may do another call closer to the event, in case we find that we need more help.
The EuroPython 2021 organization is starting and we're looking for more help with running the conference.
EuroPython 2019 Team
For EP2021, we are using a slightly different approach compared to previous years:
All new volunteers will first join the Plaza – our central get-together place for all team members – and only later enter the various workgroups (WGs) we have for running the conference.
Additionally, we will have on-boarding calls with everyone to get to know each other and give an overview to the structures, information and groups we have available, as well as the timeline.
If you are interested in helping, please write to volunteers@europython.eu. Our team will then answer any questions you may have and get you signed up for the next on-boarding call.
To get an idea of the various work fields, please have a look at our workgroup overview.
The site comes with an FAQ page, which lists all the information we have for you at the moment. We're repeating the most important part here:
EuroPython 2021 will be held online from July 26 - August 1, 2021, using the following structure:
two workshop/training days (July 26 - 27)
three conference days (July 28 - 30)
two sprint days (July 31 - August 1)
The next steps are preparing the main conference website, adding content, organizing the call for papers (CFP), setting up the ticket system, the financial aid program, getting everything tested and deployed.
Want to join the fun ?
We'll have busy weeks ahead of us. If you want to help, please consider contacting us with details on where you would like to contribute. Please write to volunteers@europython.eu.
Distributed conferencing
We are also looking into setting up what we call EuroPython Nodes, where attendees can join small groups around the world to attend EuroPython 2021 together. Please see our FAQ entry for details. The idea is still in flux and we'd like to get some feedback from user groups or companies interested in participating.
PS: We have also moved our blog off of Tumblr and onto our own infrastructure. Hope you like the new design.
We are currently working out the format for this year’s online EuroPython conference. The conference will be run using online conference tools during the week of July 26 - August 1 and we would like to learn about your preferences regarding the overall structure.
For this reason, we’re running a poll to gather input from our (potential) attendees:
Please add any comments you may have to the comment field. We’d love to hear about new online conference platforms you may have seen (last year, we used Zoom and Discord), suggestions on social event formats, etc.
Over the last few weeks, Anthon van der Neut, our media work group chair for EP2015 and EP2016, put in a lot of effort into getting all our conference videos on archive.org, the Internet Archive.
Archive.org is not meant as an alternative for YouTube to watch the videos, but it allows you to retrieve the original uploads, and as such also functions as a backup location for the us and the community.
He first downloaded all videos from our YouTube account (over 2.5TB as of this writing), then enriched the meta data based on the talk information we have on the websites, fixed issues he found, and then uploaded the videos and meta data to our archive.org account. Overall, around 40 hours of work went into this.
We now have more than 1000 conference videos available on our archive.org account, covering EP2014 - EP2020.
after our first successful “Ask me Anything” (AMA) session in September we want to run another meeting this Thursday to answer any questions you may have, share our knowledge or help you in planning your online event.
Some of the topics we can cover:
our tools research and findings
our concepts for running an online conference or event
our experience with running EuroPython online
what we could do to support you
how our Zoom license sharing works
how you can apply for a grant
how the EuroPython Society works
how we run the EuroPython organization with fully remote work groups
and, of course, anything else :-)
If you’re interested in joining the call, please send your name and email to helpdesk@europython.eu and we’ll send you the invite for the call on
Thursday, Nov 19, starting at 19:30 CET.
When requesting the invite, please also consider adding more context, in case we’d have to prepare for the answers, so we can better prepare and make the meeting more effective.
Please note that we will be recording the meeting and put it up on our YouTube account after the call, just like we did last time.
BTW: We are making our conference resources available on our website, in case you have missed our blog post earlier this year.
We have 131 videos available in total, covering a very broad set of Python topics, so there’s going to be something interesting for everyone.
We hope to see you all again next year and perhaps even have a few more people attending EuroPython 2021 Online, now that the format has proven successful. Stay safe.
In the last few weeks, we had a close look at the how the situation around COVID-19 is panning out. Unfortunately, things are not moving in a direction where we’d feel confident to hold next year’s conference as an in-person event in Dublin.
EuroPython 2022 in Dublin
After discussion with the venue, we decided to postpone the in-person conference for another year, to July 11-17 2022 in Dublin, Ireland. We are currently finalizing the details.
Since going online has proven to work well, we also want to keep the momentum for EuroPython 2022 and are planning to run the event in a hybrid version, where both speakers and attendees can optionally join online.
EuroPython 2021 Online
Given the experience with running EuroPython 2020 online this year, we are sure that EuroPython 2021 will be a success as well.
We will take the experience we’ve gained from this year’s event to improve the online version next year, simplify some aspects, reactivate finaid and enable joining it in smaller groups to create a distributed experience.
We’re still collecting ideas, so if you have any suggestions, we’d love to hear them. Please write to helpdesk@europython.eu.
we want to try a new experiment and run an “Ask me Anything” (AMA) this Thursday to answer questions you may have, share our knowledge or help you in planning your online event.
Some of the topics we can cover:
our tools research and findings
our concepts for running an online conference or event
our experience with running EuroPython online
what we could do to support you
how our Zoom license sharing works
how you can apply for a grant
how the EuroPython Society works
how we run the EuroPython organization with fully remote work groups
and, of course, anything else :-)
If you’re interested in joining the call, please send your name and email to helpdesk@europython.eu and we’ll send you the invite for the call on
Thursday, Sept 24, starting at 19:30 CEST.
When requesting the invite, please also consider adding any more detailed questions, so we can better prepare and make the meeting more effective.
If there is demand, we’ll probably have these calls on a monthly basis to keep the momentum going.
BTW: We are making our conference resources available on our website, in case you have missed our blog post earlier this year.
