PGConf.EU 2018 - the biggest one yet!
It's now almost a month since PGConf.EU 2018 in Lisbon. PGConf.EU 2018 was the biggest PGConf.EU ever, and as far as I know the biggest PostgreSQL community conference in the world! So it's time to share some of the statistics and feedback.
I'll start with some attendee statistics:
451 registered attendees 2 no-shows 449 actual present attendees
Of these 451 registrations, 47 were sponsor tickets, some of who were used by sponsors, and some were given away to their customers and partners. Another 4 sponsor tickets went unused.
Another 52 were speakers.
This year we had more cancellations than we've usually had, but thanks to having a waitlist on the conference we managed to re-fill all those spaces before the event started.
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!
What does it mean to be on the board of PostgreSQL Europe
With the upcoming elections in PostgreSQL Europe, I'm excited to see that we have more candidates than ever before. But during the FOSDEM conference we just finished in Brussels, that also lead to a fairly large number of people who asked me the simple question "what does it actually mean to be on the board of PostgreSQL Europe". So I think it's time to summarize that for both those standing for election, and for the members of the organisation in general.
For a TL; DR; version, being on the board basically means a lot of administrative work :) But read on for some details.
PGConf.EU 2017 - time for the statistics
For anybody following this blog, you'll know I do this every year. PGConf.EU completed several weeks ago, and we have now collected the statistics, and I'd like to share some numbers.
Let me start with some statistics that are not based on the feedback, but instead based on the core contents of our registration database. I've had several people ask exactly how we count our attendees when we say it's the largest PGConf.EU ever, so here are the numbers:
Our total number of attendees registered was 437. This includes all regular attendees, speakers, training attendees, sponsor tickets and exhibitor only tickets. Of these 437 people, 12 never showed up. This was a mix of a couple of sponsor tickets and regular attendees, and 3 training attendees. This means we had 425 people actually present.
We don't take attendance each day. Right after the keynote on the first day there were just over 20 people who had not yet shown up, and by the end of the conference the total that number was down to 12. There were definitely fewer than 400 people who remained on a late Friday afternoon for the closing sessions, but at lunchtime the crowd was approximately the same size.
On top of the 437 actual attendees, we also had 5 further sponsor tickets that were never claimed. And we had another 59 people still on the waitlist, since we were unfortunately up against venue limits and we not able to sell all the requested tickets.
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 2016 attendee statistics
It is now about a week since PGConf.EU 2016, and things are slowly returning to normal :) You'll have to wait a while longer for the traditional summary of the feedback post that I make every year, but there's another piece of statistics I'd like to share.
As always, Dave put the attendees per country statistics into the closing session slides, and we shared some of the top countries. Unsurprisingly, countries like Estonia (the host country), Germany (one of Europes larges country), Sweden and Russia (countries near by) were at the top.
For those looking into more details, here is the actual statistics for all countries and not just the top ones (click for bigger version)
Nordic PGDay 2016 open for registration
Nordic PGDay is a yearly one-day conference in the Nordic region, and this year it will be held in Helsinki, Finland, on March 17th. We have just opened up for registration! The event sold out in the past two years, so get your tickets early!
The call for papers is still open, which means that we do not yet have a schedule. We hope to post this as soon as possible after the CfP closes, but you can as usual count on a full day of interesting talks about PostgreSQL!
And for those of you who are interested in speaking, yes, the CfP is open until the end of this week. Get your submissions in!
PGConf.EU 2014 - feedback is in
It's that time of the year again - we've wrapped PGConf.EU 2014, and I've just closed the feedback system, so it's time to take a look at what's been said.
We're keeping fairly consistent numbers with previous years, which is something we are definitely happy with. We did have a slight drop in "overall view", since this year we had 8% ranking us as 3, a worse score than we saw last year, and we had a couple of fewer people voting 5. And a slight shift from 5 to 4 on the programme. The numbers are still good of course, but since we had a tiny drop last year as well, we need to step our game back up for next year!
This year we had a slightly bigger spread of how users identify themselves, seeing most categories chip away a little on DBAs and Developers, but they are still definitely the dominating categories. We also have a lot of returning developers - it's cool to see so many people who have been to every one of our events so far, combined with a full 25% being first-time attendees!
Nordic PGDay 2014 - wrap-up of the wrap-up
Nordic PGDay 2014 was just over a week ago in Stockholm, Sweden, and was definitely a success. A lot more people than we initially expected had the event sell out completely a couple of weeks before it happened. A week later we've now collected the feedback forms that people filled out (a big thanks to the 25-30 people who did fill them out - a 30% "hit rate" on feedback forms gives us a pretty good input).
I'll lead with a few graphs that fairly well represents the feedback:
In particular, that every person who filled out our feedback would recommend the event to friends or colleagues is definitely a flattering grade!
Nordic PGDay 2014 - come join us up north!
It's been discussed for several years, so I'm very happy to finally be able to announce that next year, there will be a Nordic PGDay, in Stockholm, Sweden, on March 20th. It will follow a pattern that is common to those of you that have already visited other PostgreSQL event - a combination of great talks from PostgreSQL insiders, and a hallway track to meet and talk with other PostgreSQL people. As this is our first instance in the Nordics, it will be a single-track single-day event, but we hope to grow it in the future.
Our main target audience is in the Nordics, and we hope to see a lot of visitors not just from Sweden but also from our neighboring countries. Since this means the official language of the conference will be English, we will of course also welcome both visitors and speakers from the rest of Europe and the world as well!
We have not yet opened our call for papers, but plan to do so shortly. We have also not opened registration yet, as we do not know exactly what the entrance cost will be yet. This will be depending on how many sponsors we can sign up for the event - which we have also not opened up for yet (a pattern is emerging here). But the date and venue is set, so mark your calendars and start moving other events around so you can be sure to make it...
If your company is interested in sponsoring the event, please let us know at sponsors@nordicpgday.org, and we'll be sure to send you our sponsorship information as soon as it's available!
For the rest of you, keep up with our website or follow us on Twitter for updates!
See you in Stockholm in March next year!