So, Kiev 2013
Hi,
It was officially announced a few days ago that the next YAPC::Europe will be held in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. Have you also heard that Kiev is the best city in the world? :-)
Let me share some basic information we've got today about the conference, almost a year before it.
There are three main persons behind the conference: Yaroslav Korshak, Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi and me. Together (in different combinations) we've organised about 30 Perl workshops and conferences in 7 countries. In 2007, I started the YAPC::Russia series and in 2011 I received the White Camel Award because of doing that. The recent conferences in Kiev, including YAPC::Russia codenamed Perl Mova and the Black Perl are the ones organised by these two guys, Yaroslav and Viacheslav. They did an excellent job this year gathering ~200 attendees and inviting a few foreign speakers.
During the last few years the Moscow.pm and Kiev.pm groups (by the way, did you see the new pm.org site launched yesterday?) made four proposals to host YAPC::Europe in Moscow, Kiev, Riga and again Kiev. Half of our proposals were accepted, and I was leading the YAPC::Europe in Riga last year with 278 officially checked-in people and 300 people appeared at the attendees dinner :-)
There's official Twitter account of the next YAPC: @yapcrussia. Please don't be confused by its name, it is simply our twitter where we tweet about our conferences, including international ones.
During the following couple of months we would like to sign the contract with the venue and thus will be able to fix and announce the dates of the conference. Roughly speaking, it will be in the middle of August 2013. In the proposal we listed seven venues which we now have to carefully filter. No double, one of the parameters which we desire to minimise, is the price but be sure we don't miss other main characteristics such as room size and equipment, location, air conditioning, catering services etc.
As in Riga, we plan to make special care of the speakers, proposing a free Speaker Training before the conference and one or two Speaker Rooms in the venue where the speakers will be able to make the final preparations (alternatively, they may start preparing their slides there :-) and maybe test the laptop if we have a free available beamer in the venue.
Being a subject still to be changed, we plan not to include the Attendees Dinner in the schedule but rather invite the attendees and their partners to the River Cruise along the Dnieper in one of the evenings.
People attending this year's conference in Frankfurt complained about the absence of the Auction. What do you think, do we need to continue with the Auction or not?
I also would like to ask about the BOFs. Honestly, I attended a BOF only once, and it was a stand-up chat between three people, and I personally do not know what is a real BOF and how popular that format is. Could you please explain it a bit in the comments and collaborate if it is still necessary to find the rooms and time for the BOF sections.
The conference site will be launched when we know the dates; we will blog-n-tweet about it. This time we will introduce online check-in process for the registered attendees and speakers so that they print their badges at home (colour or black and white, does not matter). In Riga, we worked with the home printed bar codes and produced badges (well, sticky labels) on demand in the venue but also failed to avoid the long line and forced people to be disappointed with the process. Hope this time it will work. Thanks for everybody who replied to our recent tweet about that.
Together with the site we'll launch e-mail announcements for the registered users. I think we also open talk submissions and for sure the payment gate :-) I have a couple other ideas for the conference site and I hope we'll be able to implement them in time.
If you or your company would like to sponsor the YAPC::Europe 2013, or have a booth there, please contact us at mail@yapcrussia.org as soon as you can. The detailed sponsorship proposal will appear on the site as soon as it is launched. I also would like to substantially change the rules for the sponsors willing to recruit during the conference.
So, this is the first short portion of the information you need to know about the next YAPC::Europe in Kiev. See you there!
P. S. The insider news: Damian Conway has already agreed to attend and speak at the conference.
I blog about Perl.
Please make sure that he gets a visa. Otherwise, I understand, he will not be let into the Ukraine (as Australia is one of the few countries of which its citizens need a visa to travel to the Ukraine).
Hey, Andrew. Yes, I think an auction is great. Make it online or in paper for small items. Make half a dozen crazy items live, if you wish. That would be what I would do if I was organizing it :) Good luck!
Definitely no live auction, please. The auction was a nice idea while Greg McCarroll was doing it, then the attraction faded, and the last few years the auctions were sooo boring. An auction behind the scenes, like Alberto says, would be ok.
And please make sure the venue is air-conditioned. :) Or maybe Kiev doesn't get that hot anyway...
Best of luck and thank you (plural) for organizing the conference!
Please, no live auction. Even if you could get Greg out of retirement, it's had its day.
Just a thought: Have "posters" or some other form where a the individual Perl developers could show off their own projects. Maybe allow individuals to have their own (shared?) booth.
The idea is that it might be frightening for a first-time to start a conversation with random "famous Perl hacker". If s/he was standing next to a poster or booth discussing a subject, that could be a better opportunity to start talking.
Indeed, please no live auction. It was funny years ago but in the last years tended to be a rather wasted timeslot.
No live auction please - lightening talks at the end of every day is good.
If there are things like books or t-shirts to sell, a silent auction will do. A live auction is only interesting if there are truly exceptional things. But if you have none, no need to make up something artificial. As Matt noted, we no longer need the auction whether as funding source or as a community event.
Also, I'm taking the opportunity of being currently unemployed to modernize the Act hosting and finally migrate to the PSGI port. So adding new features (like QR codes badges) should be easier and faster.
Go for it, Andrew!
Now, if only we could find out where YAPC::NA::2013 will be held ... :-)
Invite speakers from outside of our Perl echo-chamber!