So, on the train down to LPW, I came across my notes from this summer about YAPC::EU::2010, my 6th YAPC, and the first that I’ve helped with as an orga ;-)

• The general trend of YAPCs is to build on the successes of previous years, push the standard higher in some aspects, and to make a few new mistakes along the way, just to mix things up a little ;-) I don’t think we broke this trend.
• Having a distributed orga-team isn’t impossible.
  • Last year, cog managed with nobody actually resident in Lisbon.
  • This year, we lost several key orgas, and much of the rest of the local contingent emigrated to UK, Spain, Holland, Austria, … distributed teams work very well for some things: getting sponsorship and drafting advertising copy can actively benefit from an international perspective, and bikeshedding^Wcollaboratively editing using git/googledocs/typewithme and IRC is fine.
  • But you do need some people in the same country (and ideally city) as the conference.  To do things like visit the venue and restaurant, chase up local suppliers, arrange deliveries etc.  Peppe++
• Starting the conference at 10am may have been the best decision we made. (And dakkar++ for a great schedule all round).
• Getting wifi for 300 geeks isn’t easy.
  • The option we provided worked pretty well, as soon as Devitalia (who we’d repeatedly told to expect 300 geeks) realised that we really meant it.
• Catering is expensive. But it’s worthwhile, and I think we got good value for the money, as the lunches and coffees were excellent. If you want to save money on catering, then make sure you either
  • have a venue in town so that people can eat lunch wherever they want to (but then have a 2hr lunch) or
  • have a university or similar venue that will let you buy in crates of sandwiches.
• Because we were out of town, we felt we should organize shuttle buses.
  • These worked really well. And at least 2 people understood peppe’s ravings about it.
• The t-shirts were great! oha’s girlfriend Micaela designed the lovely Leonardo’s Onion logo, and ludan arranged printing and delivered them in his car (a big car, but rammed full of boxes even so).
• Video recording is hard.
  • We tried (via news items on the site and mailing list) to suggest that
    • people should record screencasts, which a few people did (Reini Urban and Tim Bunce that I’m aware of) and
    • to ask for volunteers.
  • We did get some loans of video cameras (from mst@shadowcat, Ranguard@foxtons, Wendy@dijkmat, and Dirk@ModuleBuilder, which was fantastic. Dakkar mostly babysat the cameras, with Emiliano Bruni working as cameraman for the auditorium. But with one camera per room, mostly static, and mostly unmanned (e.g. for monitoring audio/video quality) the results are very much “best endeavours”. Peppe has worked heroically to upload all the footage that’s usable from this, but a lot of people (us included) have wondered how it could be improved. I think
  • what’s there is nice as a community artefact, to prove that there were interesting talks, and as a reminder of what happened. It may be that it’s worth doing it at this level just for those reasons.
  • if we wanted anything more slick, for example, to distribute outside the community, then we could do with
    • professional recording/editing. This costs a fortune. Sponsors who wish to facilitate this for future conferences would be welcomed gratefully, I suspect.
    • volunteers with experience of lighting/sound-recording/video-recording/editing.
  • I wonder if it would be better for a team of 2-3 people to record just one track every day, with multiple cameras, rather than attempt every talk?
  • I think that, without such sponsorship/volunteers, it would be entirely acceptable to not video YAPC at all.
  • As the orga-in-chief for ::EU::2011 is Andy Shitov, who masterminded yapc.tv, I’m sure he will have ideas/resources to make this one of the things that he raises the standard of ;-)
• Running an auction is hard. This was the one thing that I attempted to run, and it was interesting, though not entirely successful. Many people had suggested that the auction was overlong usually, and we thought of doing it as “Lightning Auctions” with guest auctioneers. This was refined into a competition, which we thought would be fun, as the auctioneers competed, by any means possible, to raise the most money.
  • Not having an experienced auctioneer available is a disadvantage.
    • BUT… the auctioneers we did get though were fantastic! Dave Rolsky and brian d foy worked really well together. Matt Trout and Dave Cross were excellent, and we were really lucky to be able to team up the legendary Josette Garcia from O’Reilly with Michel Rodriguez to make the most bizarrely European team possible!
  • having a compere (dakkar), treasurer (arthas), and a gavel^Wgong banger (R Geoff Avery) was, I think, a good idea
    • BUT… I hadn’t had/made time to do a rehearsal, and I hadn’t made sure the roles were entirely clear. At one point Geoff asked me if he could time out an (overrunning) lot, and I realised I’d just assumed he’d do it because he was the “lightning talks guy”…
  • The runners didn’t know what they were supposed to do.  Oops.
  • I hadn’t stage managed how the paths (runners -> lots -> auctioneers -> purchasers; purchasers -> cash-desk; auctioneer switch-over) would work, so things got clogged up.
  • Organizing the lots, and having slides with photos etc. was a good idea. It also helped as we could run these through with the auctioneers, so they were familiar with the lots beforehand.
    • BUT… should have done this sooner, to be able to let bidders (attending, or remote) know what there was to bid for in advance.
  • Minimizing the number of lots was mostly a good idea.
    • AND… getting rid of most of the “low value” items via silent auction worked really well
    • BUT… having no low value items at all meant that many casual attendees (who weren’t going to spend £400 on a t-shirt) couldn’t bid at all, and perhaps didn’t feel involved
  • The element of competition was fun
    • BUT… had unintended consequences. Instead of deciding that a particular lot wasn’t selling and just calling it, auctioneers would drag things out to extract every last euro. (This was also partly due to the small number of high-ish value items).
    • (Of course, this made us more money in the end, at the expense of having a 2-hour auction, as per usual, instead of the short, sharp one we’d planned)
  • Team bids are fun
    • BUT… entirely confusing. It might be better to insist that team bids are made only by a single figurehead. Anyone else would have to go through them.
  • All in all, I think it was an interesting experiment, and I’ll be interested to see if any of the elements that worked get reused and built on for future conferences!
• I hadn’t been going to give a talk, but at some point, chatting on irc we decided that someone should write a Renaissance sonnet in honour of peppe, for all his hard work.
  • This somehow metamorphosed into a lightning talk about, among other things, Renaissance love poetry and time travel.
  • Me and larsen++ developed the talk, he made the slides almost impossibly beautiful in Keynote and photoshop.  I presented. It worked really well.
  • We got some lovely comments in the evaluation, but I particularly loved that
    • I got high ratings for “Speaker’s knowledge of the subject” (not clear if that’s the poetry or the time travel)
    • this pair of answers:
      • Q: What worked well? A: It all made sense at the time
      • Q: What could be improved?  A: I need a time machine to go back then and make it make sense again
• The trip to Florence was fun! But I’m not going to give up my day job to become a tour guide any time soon ;-) In general, the Friends and Family programme that arthas put on worked really well, and had great feedback.

The complexity of Italian tax law means that we’re not able to discuss the finances in any detail till year end but… with the information we do have, we can say that we more than broke even, yay!  We’ve already been able to contribute back to the grassroots Perl community by donating some of the surplus to YAPC::EU::2011 in Riga, and to YEF — there’ll be an official announcement of that soon, but I’m just delighted that we (by which I mean in particular our treasurer Michele, and the Budget-focused Peppe,) were able to make the conference economically viable in the middle of a global recession.  This in itself was, of course, only made possible by the generosity of our sponsors, and the commitment of the attendees who spent their (or their companies’) time and money to turn up and make the conference happen.

So, that’s the end of my tardy YAPC wrap-up except for the question: would I do it again? Well, in the immortal words of the comedy dance/”song” routine:

MOAR! MOAR! MOAR!