Andrew Shitov

Dear readers,

This Sunday post is the last one before the new 2013 year begins. So, a beautiful chance to have an opportunity to list some results that we achieved during the year and share some plans for the next one.

This year we made a big and very brave step towards hosting YAPC::Europe in Kiev. We made a proposal to the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee after the announcement that there were no other groups to host the conference in 2013. On the one side, we had an experience with making smaller events in Kiev and the YAPC in Riga in recent years, on the other, we have failed with our proposal to host the conference in Kiev in 2010. I knew that it would be difficult to find a suitable and big enough venue in the city but two guys, Yaroslav Korshak and Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi made a beautiful explorations of the places in Kiev where that was possible. We have selected the Ukrainian House, the building that I was looking at for a few years, even not thinking that it was possible to talk to its owners :-)

Last week we signed a contract with the venue and thus we officially announced in our Twitter post that the dates of the conference are now fixed. The YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev will be held on 12-14 August 2013.

Before the end of the year we managed to launched the conference site with a canonical address: yapc.eu/2013. (The URL unification is also a nice trend that other conference organisers follow for a couple of years).

Since the launch of the site a week ago, there are already 55 registered users from 13 different countries and 19 monger groups (well, with some non-geographical exceptions).

This is a fantastic result for the first week after site launch, especially regarding the fact that we did not announce the final dates when we launched it.

We also are happy that there is the first sponsor of the conference: the Third Lane Technologies company. We encourage all the companies who use Perl as their main tool or just for their minor daily activities to help us with organizing the event which helps all the Perl programmers to achieve better results and to the Perl language to develop. Read our Sponsorship Proposal; we are open for any discussions about the conditions and things that we offer to the sponsors.

What are the plans for the first half of 2013?

Well, we already did everything we need and now can just sit and wait while all the above numbers grow by themselves :-)

Seriously speaking, we need to make a huge number of different things. Among them, polishing the site and launching a few pages, such as the page about Kiev sightseeing, hotel reservation, preparing wiki pages etc.

We will also work on gathering the best available talks and speakers so that we have big and well packed schedule. I would also like to have the Speaker training before the conference. I am convinced that even one day before the conference is enough to improve the quality of a number of talks. You can submit a talk right now.

We also need to organise the River Cruise and catering services both for the cruise and the main talks days of the conference. Not counting the pre-conference meeting and Perl 6 hackathon. (We are still waiting for somebody to lead the Perl 5 hackathon.)

We also work on the ways letting the attendees to book a hotel for a minimal available price, which, I think, should become one of the obligatory tasks for the organisers of the future events. Also we will try to open an air flight ticket search page to help finding and buying the cheapest tickets (basically, I am waiting when our partner will make the English version of their site).

So, there are lots of things to do in the following months. Some of them are difficult, some are easy enough. All in all, the work we do is not only needed for making the great conference once a year but also moves the Perl programming language into the future, delivering the Future Perl today.