Updates about upcoming conferences
Summer vacation times are over. Well, for some of us at least, clearly some are still lucky enough to be off, which is showing itself a bit (see below). But as both conference organisation and participation throughout the rest of the year is starting to be clear, I figure it's time to share some updates around different ones.
Postgres Open SV
First of all - if you haven't already, don't forget to register for Postgres Open SV in San Francisco in two weeks time! Registration for the main US West Coast/California PostgreSQL community conference will close soon, so don't miss your chance. I'm looking forward to meeting many old and new community members there.
PostgreSQL Conference Europe
Next up after Postgres Open will be pgconf.eu, the main European PostgreSQL community conference of 2018. The planning for this years conference is at full speed, but unfortunately we are slightly behind. In particular, we were supposed to be notifying all speakers today if they were accepted or not, and unfortunately our program committee are a bit behind schedule on this one. We had over 200 submissions this year which makes their work even bigger than usual. But speakers will be receiving their notification over the upcoming couple of days.
Hopefully once all speakers have been able to confirm their attendance, we will also have a schedule out soon. Until then, you can always look at the list of accepted talks so far. This list is dynamically updated as speakers get approved and confirm their talks.
We have already sold approximately half of the tickets that we have available this year, so if you want to be sure to get your spot, we strongly recommend that you register as soon as you can! And if you want to attend the training sessions, you should hurry even more as some are almost sold out!
PGConf.ASIA
Work on the program committee of PGConf.ASIA has also been going on over the late summer, and is mostly done! The schedule is not quite ready yet, but expected out shortly. You can look forward to a very interesting lineup of speakers, so if you are in the Asian region, I strongly recommend keeping an eye out for when the registration opens, and join us in Tokyo!
FOSDEM PGDay
As has been announced, PostgreSQL Europe will once again run a FOSDEM PGDay next to the big FOSDEM conference in Brussels in February next year. We hope to also run our regular booth and developer room during FOSDEM, but those are not confirmed yet (more info to come). The Friday event, however, is fully confirmed. Of course not open for registration yet, but we'll get there.
Nordic PGDay
Nordic PGDay has been confirmed for March 19th next year. The format will be similar to previous years, and we will soon announce the location. For now, mark your calendars to make sure you don't double book! And rest assured, the conference will take place somewhere in the Nordics!
Usergroups and PGDays
Then there are a number of smaller events of course. Next week, I will speak at the Prague PostgreSQL Meetup. We should be kicking off the Stockholm usergroup. PDXPUG runs a PGDay in Portland in September (which I unfortunately won't be able to attend). In general, it seems like usergroups are starting to get going again after the summer break, so check with your local group(s) what's happening!
Financial updates in PostgreSQL Europe
As we say welcome to a new year, we have a couple of updates to the finances and payment handling in PostgreSQL Europe, that will affect our members and attendees of our events.
First of all, PostgreSQL Europe has unfortunately been forced to VAT register. This means that most of our invoices (details below) will now include VAT.
Second, we have enabled a new payment provider for those of you that can't or prefer not to use credit cards but that still allows for fast payments.
PGConf.EU 2012 - what about next year
In our conference feedback, we also asked for a number of things that are designed to help us decide what to do next year. The most obvious one, of course, being where the conference should be next year.
Without even reading the texts behind the truncated texts, it's obvious that this didn't help us very much. The only city that scored higher than the average was Vienna - and it's likely not a coincidence that this is the option that's geographically closest to Prague, so it's the closest one for most of our attendees. In general we have to declare this as a draw - all suggested cities seem to be equally popular. So no direct guidance from there. While we have nothing to announce yet, we have already started considering locations for next year - but it won't be announced until we know something for certain.
Summary of feedback from FOSDEM devroom
I forgot completely to close up the feedback system for our talks at FOSDEM and post the feedback to the speakers. My apologies to all speakers and others who were interested! Thankfully, Marc Balmer reminded me today and the individual ratings for different speakers have been sent off to them.
When it comes to the aggregated statistics, they look fairly similar to what we saw at PGDay. The number of speakers were much lower, and unfortunately so were the number of people giving feedback. But in the end, the results were fairly clear. I am especially happy with the level of knowledge in the speakers we attract. Let's start with the graphs:
Breaking down the details, I think this shows a great quality of our speakers:
Name | Speaker Quality | Votes | Deviation Simon Riggs | 4.8 | 6 | 0.4 Magnus Hagander | 4.6 | 5 | 0.5 David Fetter | 4.5 | 4 | 1 Heikki Linnakangas | 4.3 | 9 | 0.9 Dave Page | 4.2 | 10 | 1.0 Marc Balmer | 3.4 | 5 | 1.7 Peter Eisentraut | 3.3 | 7 | 1.0
And the level of their knowledge is even higher:
Name | Speaker Knowledge | Votes | Deviation Simon Riggs | 5 | 6 | 0 Magnus Hagander | 5 | 5 | 0 Heikki Linnakangas | 5 | 9 | 0 David Fetter | 4.8 | 4 | 0.5 Dave Page | 4.3 | 10 | 1.1 Peter Eisentraut | 4.3 | 7 | 1.1 || Marc Balmer || 3.6 || 5 || 1.7 ||
Even at the bottom of this list, the numbers are very good! Unfortunately, the fairly low number of votes give a high deviation at the bottom of the chart.
For next time, we'd really like to get more people to leave their feedback. Does anybody have a good idea on how to make that happen?