Report of wash-up meeting in Cardiff

14th November 2015

Fifteen of us braved howling wind and driving rain (Daniele and Vince have promised better weather next September) to meet up in Cardiff last Saturday, to look around City Hall, to discuss how the last conference went, and to begin to talk about the kind of conference we’d like to see next year. It was deliberately not a planning meeting.

We were firstly given a tour of the available rooms at Cardiff’s City Hall. We were shown around by Gale, a member of the events team at City Hall. She seemed very competent and accommodating, and not in the least bit fazed by the prospect of hosting several hundred Python people.

You can get a good feel for the aesthetic of the venue (Wikipedia calls it “Edwardian Baroque”) from the virtual tour on the City Hall website. There are several rooms we could use, with the largest being the Assembly Room (which seats up to 600), with several rooms of other sizes. Catering could be done on site in the Lower Hall. It is likely that we’d need to provide our own PA system.

We then had a sandwich lunch at the maths faculty, and spent a couple of hours talking about last year and about possibilities for next year.

Mary began by giving a statement of last year’s accounts. In short, we’re in a very healthy financial position. Full accounts will be circulated once everything has been settled up.

Kristian then gave a short presentation about user stories. A user story is a way of capturing what a user needs in order to achieve a goal, and takes the general form “As $role I want $desire so that $benefit”. There are several technical examples on Wikipedia, and Kristian has written more about this on his blog.

The reason I wanted us to talk about user stories is that I’m not aware of us ever really having discussed the questions “what is PyCon UK for?” and “what do the people who come to PyCon UK (our users) want out of the conference?”. Writing user stories is one way to help us answer these questions, and I hope, over the coming months, to collect and curate a set of user stories from members of the community, relating to their expectations and requirements of the conference.

We then split into groups of three, and spent time reading through the feedback gathered from users after the last conference, and trying to turn some of the feedback into user stories. It was not possible to produce user stories directly from a lot of feedback, but I found that often a piece of feedback prompted us to think more generally about a what somebody needs or wants out of a conference.

Luis is collecting the user stories that we produced, and I hope we can use these to seed a user story database before we start inviting contributions from members of the community.

Daniele then talked about Cardiff as a city for hosting a conference, drawing on his experience of running the Django Weekend in 2014 and DjangoCon EU in 2015. He talked about the kinds of social events that they had hosted (including some evening meals at the Clink and the conference dinner at the National Museum) and about the kinds of things they had done to look after the wellbeing of delegates, including bringing in some counsellors from the University for free consultation sessions.

Daniele talked about how DjangoCon EU aimed to be as inclusive as possible, by doing things such as providing a creche and providing some financial support. He also talked about choosing a programme so that there was always at least one woman speaking during each of the four sessions during the day. (To do this meant rejecting talks from some established and well-known speakers, but as a delegate I thought the average standard of the talks at the conference was higher than almost any other conference I’ve been to.)

He also shared an overview of the DjangoCon EU budget, which makes me confident that we can put on an affordable conference in Cardiff next year.

Zeth then talked about plans for an unconference in Birmingham early next year, as well as his plans to put in a bid to host EuroPython in Birmingham in 2017. It sounds like plans for both of these are at an early stage, and I’ll let him update us as these develop.

We then talked about establishing the PyCon UK Society as a legal entity. Zeth has talked in the past with Van (chair of the PSF) about options for becoming the UK branch of the PSF, but we felt that getting this right might take some time, and that we should get a move on. Kristian has looked into various options for this and will report soon about the best options for next year.

We ended the meeting by brainstorming ideas for “fantasy PyCon UK”. To keep things moving, I suggested that we took it in turns to suggest a short . I didn’t feel this worked brilliantly as a format (I’m sorry about this) but it led to some quite useful discussion about the kind of conference we might want to be involved with. It also provided evidence of Inglesby’s Law: “As a gathering of Python programmers goes on, the probability of the discussion ending up at Python 2 vs Python 3 approaches 1”.

Once again, I’d like to thank everybody who came for giving up their Saturdays and bringing lots of ideas and enthusiasm to the discussion. I’m looking forward to working with all of you over the coming months.