jessenoller.com

Pre­am­ble

There’s been some recent dis­cus­sion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speak­ers should have to pay for admis­sion as well — see Chris Wanstrath’s (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Con­vore thread for exam­ples. Obvi­ously, as PyCon is the “big dog” so to speak for Python con­fer­ences, every­one looks to “us” for a model to work from, or how we man­age things. I’ve seen a lot of poop slung towards the Djan­go­Con orga­niz­ers, mainly due to a lack of know­ing “why” cer­tain poli­cies (such as “Every­one Pays”) exist for Djan­go­Con, PyCon, and other conferences.

As co-chair and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair last year, and pro­gram com­mit­tee chair the year before, and now chair for the next two years — I fig­ured it might be good to take a moment to explain the ratio­nale behind PyCon’s approach — as well as some sta­tis­tics about the bud­get. I’m not going to state that this pol­icy is per­fect; nor that it won’t be changed; I also will not release the bud­get pub­licly — I don’t think giv­ing every­one a spread­sheet with­out the con­text of the hun­dreds of man hours of work that go into it is use­ful, at all.

Impor­tant Note: PyCon is orga­nized and man­aged by the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion — this means that, as part of being a 501c3 char­ity, some of the finan­cials from past PyCon is avail­able as part of pub­licly acces­si­ble finan­cial doc­u­ments of the foun­da­tion. You can find those on the PSF’s site.

The same rea­son­ing may not apply to a con­fer­ence that is orga­nized by a com­mer­cial entity or is done for profit. OSCON is a com­mer­cial con­fer­ence, so hav­ing speak­ers get in free is gen­er­ally expected. DjangoCon.us is in the mid­dle — it is orga­nized for profit by a com­mer­cial entity, but it also con­tributes heav­ily back to the Django Soft­ware Foun­da­tion. DjangoCon.eu is man­aged dif­fer­ently as well.

Pol­icy and Finan­cial Aid

First, what is the “pol­icy” — well, first, it’s not a pol­icy per-se; it’s part pol­icy, and part tra­di­tion. The pol­icy is “Every­one pays for a ticket” — atten­dees, tuto­r­ial pre­sen­ters, orga­niz­ers (mean­ing: all vol­un­teers, includ­ing the chair) and spon­sors — every­one pays their way. Yes, this means Van and myself both paid for our own tick­ets to attend. Every­one is treated as equal — spon­sors get free admis­sions as part of con­fer­ence spon­sor­ship pack­ages, and keynote speak­ers may be pro­vided with either com­pen­sa­tion or admis­sion depend­ing on the nego­ti­ated deal (some keynote speak­ers cost money, for example).

Now; an inter­est­ing aspect of this is that PyCon, as a con­fer­ence, offers a very gen­er­ous finan­cial aid pro­gram — this means that some atten­dees, speak­ers, tuto­r­ial pre­sen­ters, etc have some, or in rare cases, all of their expenses such as flight, hotel and admis­sion pro­vided to them from the PyCon bud­get. PyCon goes out of it’s way to encour­age peo­ple to apply for finan­cial aid — even if we can’t cover all of your expenses, we will give you free admis­sion based on need. The FA appli­ca­tion process is sim­ple, and straight­for­ward. It’s also very lib­eral — the only caveat is that speak­ers at the con­fer­ence “get bumped to the top” of the appli­ca­tions so that we don’t lose a good talk because of finan­cial need. We also don’t ban any­one from apply­ing (for exam­ple, I needed assis­tance in 2010 even as the PC chair).

We use the FA bud­get to not only help the “nor­mal” atten­dees of the con­fer­ence, we also keep an eye towards diver­sity — for exam­ple in 2010 we had a spe­cific grant pro­gram (funded by Google) for women to attend PyCon — which they did in amaz­ing num­bers! We also try to help more peo­ple with less money than less peo­ple with more money — we want to spread assis­tance out as much as pos­si­ble. This is why FA requires room-sharing at the con­fer­ence hotel, this is why we may only cover part of a given applicant’s costs — we want to help more peo­ple.

As you can guess — since finan­cial aid is a part of the bud­get, we allo­cate a set amount of money to this — but, with­out a solid bud­get (mean­ing, admis­sion ticket sales, spon­sor­ships, etc) we can’t have it — it’s actu­ally a dice roll. We can guess at how much FA we can carve out of the bud­get at the start of the process, and we will award that amount — but that means if we have low atten­dance, don’t book enough rooms, or our cater­ing costs spike, or lack spon­sors, the con­fer­ence can lose not insignif­i­cant amounts of money help­ing peo­ple. The rub being, you don’t know for sure if this will hap­pen until the con­fer­ence actu­ally hap­pens.

So, how does “every­body pays” play into this? In two ways. First, it helps hedge our risk, insti­tu­tion­ally speak­ing. PyCon had a good/bad year in 2009 — good for the atten­dees, but hor­ren­dously bad finan­cially. We made var­i­ous com­mit­ments in 2008 just as the mar­kets were peak­ing, and we lost a lot of money when every­thing went south. Since then, it has been our bud­get pol­icy to make sure that our rev­enues will cover our hard costs even if there is a 15% dip in atten­dance and a 35% dip in sponsorship.

Sec­ond, you may have guessed that the “every­body pays” pol­icy allows us to pad the finan­cial aid bud­get. This has the direct ben­e­fit of bring­ing more peo­ple to the con­fer­ence, increas­ing the diver­sity of peo­ple attend­ing, get­ting a larger pro­por­tion of the com­mu­nity together, etc.

I’m happy to say, that on most years, we very hap­pily break our finan­cial aid bud­get — mean­ing, if we have a pos­i­tive out­look, we will gladly over­spend on finan­cial aid and take less “profit ” for the con­fer­ence. The point of the con­fer­ence is the com­mu­nity, it’s not about the con­fer­ence! We help the com­mu­nity as much as we can by help­ing to cover the costs of peo­ple who would not oth­er­wise be able to attend.

His­tory and Tradition

Once you start orga­niz­ing a con­fer­ence you start to rapidly real­ize how costly things can get — and if you don’t have spon­sors with giant bags of money, or the con­fer­ence is not being run for profit (such as OSCON), you can quickly get into trou­ble if you don’t have a pol­icy in place that will ensure finan­cial viability. PyCon came from very small, hum­ble begin­nings but has grown year over year con­sis­tently — main­tain­ing the “every­one helps, and every­one pays” tra­di­tion orig­i­nally set forth.

It is my under­stand­ing that the policy/tradition has as much to do with finan­cials as it does with “the feel”. No one is treated spe­cially, we — mean­ing the com­mu­nity — put together the con­fer­ence, we are tak­ing the finan­cial risk that comes with it. We are in it together, and that means “every­one helps, and every­one pays” — it is the most equi­table solu­tion that helps us main­tain fair­ness and the flavor/feel of the con­fer­ence. When you real­ize that even Guido has to buy a ticket (even if it was paid for by Google) or that Van Lind­berg had to buy one — it sud­denly makes you real­ize that all of us truly believe in the spirit of “we are all in this”.

Speak­ers; as a an addi­tional guide­line, while always pay­ing for a ticket; always pay at the dis­counted early bird rate no mat­ter when they reg­is­ter. So yes, we do dis­count them, but no more than any­one else who reg­is­ters within the early bird window.

As an aside, the “every­body helps” is also part of what makes PyCon spe­cial. When peo­ple come to other con­fer­ences, they fre­quently come expect­ing to be cod­dled and catered to. When peo­ple come to PyCon, we hope they come expect­ing to con­tribute. Hav­ing every­body con­tribut­ing is at the core of the best parts of PyCon — from stuff­ing bags, to light­ning talks, to the won­der­ful Test­ing in Python BOF.

Hard Costs, Stats and Risk

So what makes up a PyCon bud­get? Well — Van cov­ered some of it in his won­der­ful “Behind the Scenes” post for PyCon 2011 — but in more detailed terms of per­cent­ages of the total costs for the budget:

• Cater­ing (Food, bev­er­ages): 54%
• Net­work­ing: 5%
• Audio/Visual and Video Record­ing: 13%
• Pay­ments to Tuto­r­ial Instruc­tors: 6%
• Misc/PR/Sponsors and Admin­is­tra­tion: 16%
• Swag: 2%
• Finan­cial Aid: 4%

Cater­ing, plus Finan­cial Aid and video record­ing is 70% of the bud­get alone. The total value “spent” for finan­cial aid alone well exceeds 50,000$ We spend a mas­sive amount of money for audio/visual and the video record­ing mak­ing all of the talks avail­able on the web (see the python miro com­mu­nity). Tens of thou­sands of dol­lars spent on networking.

We could forgo feed­ing peo­ple — but with a con­fer­ence that runs from 8am to 6pm for 5 days, that would suck — and peo­ple need­ing to leave to get food would be dis­rup­tive and ruin the flow. We could forgo record­ing the videos. We could do a lot of things to cut back and lower the bud­get num­bers so we could give more away (such as comp’ing speaker tick­ets), but that doesn’t make the risk and costs from the hotel go away.

• Aver­age Rev­enue per attendee: ~$300
• Aver­age Cost per attendee: ~$465

In total — these costs (for 2011) came to well over 600,000$ — that’s right. Over half a mil­lion dol­lars in hard costs for a con­fer­ence of 1,380 Python­istas. Much of the pay­ments, guar­an­tees, deposits, etc have to be put down up front of the actual con­fer­ence with no guar­an­tee that we will make our spon­sor­ship or attendee num­bers. That means, in the case of PyCon — the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion fronts poten­tially hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars in pay­ments and risk. We also expect these to climb with the move of the con­fer­ence to Santa Clara.

Con­fer­ences are unknowns — you put up a lot of time, energy and money — lots of money — and you hope you hit cer­tain num­bers. For exam­ple, you make a con­tract with the hotel that says “we will have X num­ber of peo­ple book X num­ber of rooms nights” — if you don’t meet those num­bers? The hotel penal­izes you a stun­ning amount of money. You make a con­tact for cater­ing — say­ing that you will serve X num­ber of meals — and if you don’t hit that? You get penal­ized. You put a lot of faith in mak­ing num­bers on:

• Spon­sors — with­out cor­po­rate spon­sors, we sim­ply could not exist (at this scale), period.
• Attendee Num­bers — You expect X num­ber of atten­dees, bro­ken up into “cor­po­rate, indi­vid­ual and Y” rates — cor­po­rate rate tick­ets are where you make the bulk of reg­is­tra­tion rates.
• Hotel Rooms — if you don’t hit your con­tracted num­bers, you will take a bath

Do you know what hap­pens if, for some rea­son — say an eco­nomic down­turn — you don’t make those num­bers? Your con­fer­ence loses over $230,000, pos­si­bly more. That 230k num­ber? Right around the amount PyCon 2009 lost, rep­re­sent­ing a mas­sive finan­cial loss for the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion. Yes, you try to mit­i­gate the risks by care­ful plan­ning — if you’re lucky, you get some insur­ance to cover some of the poten­tial losses. PyCon is actu­ally really lucky in all of this — we’ve grown enough that we get to lever­age economies of scale with the con­tracts we deal with. Small con­fer­ences? Not so much — they get harder in the face of fail­ure, and they don’t have the bar­gain­ing power we have..

It’s a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act, requir­ing care­ful plan­ning and a lot of work to drive atten­dance and spon­sor­ship — nego­ti­a­tions with Hotels, Cater­ing, Unions, are all things that have to go right in order to make a con­fer­ence that even stands a chance of not los­ing you mas­sive amounts of money. In the case of PyCon — a mas­sive loss of money (such as 2009) could cause the foun­da­tion to go bank­rupt and dis­solve. As it is, the foun­da­tion, already spar­tan in spend­ing cut back even fur­ther to pro­tect itself which rep­re­sents a net neg­a­tive for the Python Community.

Where does the profit go?

Alright — I’ve out­lined the phi­los­o­phy, the scale and the risk. Now, you’re prob­a­bly ask­ing where, if we have it, does any profit from the con­fer­ence go? Easy — straight back into the community.

What­ever profit — really, money left over, goes to cover the ini­tial costs/risks for PyCon the next year, and the years after — it also goes to the Python Soft­ware Foun­da­tion that in turn, rein­vests that money into the com­mu­nity (see the foun­da­tion blog).

Hav­ing a healthy pos­i­tive mar­gin also means we can increase things such as the finan­cial aid bud­get for the next year, allow­ing even more Python devel­op­ers to attend.

Why not run a bud­get that aims for 0$ +/-?!

Because, that is sim­ply insane — you can aim for min­i­mal profit by rein­vest­ing into things such as finan­cial aid, or other perks for the atten­dees but only after you have guar­an­teed you’re going to make your num­bers — see the issue? At best, you bud­get is a highly refined series of edu­cated guesses. At worst? Some­one goes bank­rupt — at smaller con­fer­ences such as DjangoCon.eu, where some costs and con­tracts are secured by an indi­vid­ual and their credit card?

That per­son goes broke, because the enti­ties you signed con­tracts with will get their money.

So, you never, ever aim for a loss, but you also don’t aim for extract­ing “max­i­mum value” from con­fer­ence atten­dees. You aim, you plan, and you hope to pro­vide the best value and expe­ri­ence to atten­dees and spon­sors — you do this through a lot of hard work and sweat. You make sure atten­dees walk away rav­ing about the con­fer­ence, you make sure you gen­er­ate the max­i­mum return on invest­ment for the com­mu­nity.

In Clos­ing

His­tor­i­cally, PyCon has never been aimed at “extract­ing money” from the com­mu­nity — it could be run a lot more prof­itably. We could increase ticket rates, reduce FA and walk around in Nascar-esque suits with spon­sor logos on them — there’s lots of things that could be done to make PyCon a mas­sive profit cen­ter for the PSF. We don’t though — why? Because, that defeats the pur­pose of a com­mu­nity con­fer­ence, put together by and for the community.

We take what money we end up with and we spon­sor the sprints at PyCon itself, we hold the lan­guage and vir­tual machine sum­mits. The PSF rein­vests it into the Python com­mu­nity as a whole (see the sprints project, for exam­ple, or the 10,000$ check we gave to PyPy). The money is given out in the forms of devel­oper grants, hold­ing sprints, pro­vid­ing spon­sor­ship to smaller Python con­fer­ences all over the world, out­reach and edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tives, etc. No one gets a shiny new car or any­thing — money that comes from the com­mu­nity con­fer­ence goes back into the com­mu­nity. You can see how much goes where if you peruse the PSF res­o­lu­tions page.

PyCon is begin­ning to also out­strip the abil­ity for a small group of vol­un­teers to put together — more and more we’ve had to bring on com­mer­cial enti­ties (whom we have to pay) to assist in orga­niz­ing or doing spe­cific things (such as reg­is­tra­tion, or web­site devel­op­ment). I fully expect PyCon 2012/2013 to quickly hit the atten­dance cap mean­ing we’re going to have more scal­ing issues and higher costs — this is a fun­da­men­tally good thing — PyCon, it is felt, can sus­tain it’s cur­rent feel and qual­ity up to a max­i­mum of 1500–2000 attendees.

We do not have the inten­tion of rais­ing that cap.

Instead, we — as the foun­da­tion — intend on encour­ag­ing smaller more regional con­fer­ences such as PyOhio to grow — PyCon will con­tinue to be the “big dog” so to speak — but it being the big dog will allow us to fur­ther cul­ti­vate and pol­lenate the entire Python com­mu­nity and ecosystem.

Given all of that — as the PyCon chair for the next two years — and being rel­a­tively com­fort­able that we will again, put on a highly suc­cess­ful con­fer­ence — I am explor­ing the idea of steeply dis­count­ing the cost of tick­ets for speak­ers. I feel that not only is the con­fer­ence viable once again, but that the speak­ers do help make the con­fer­ence what it is — last year we had over 200 talk and tuto­r­ial sub­mis­sions. All of those speak­ers sub­mit­ted talks know­ing that they would have to pay for a ticket to attend — but given the pos­i­tive out­look, I’m com­fort­able in think­ing that we will be able to pro­vide accepted speak­ers with a dis­count to thank them for their talk.

It’s all about com­mu­nity, and rein­vest­ing in it in the right places, at the right times, and man­ag­ing your risk. The risks putting on a con­fer­ence — even a small one (espe­cially a small one) are mas­sive, but the returns — espe­cially when you’re stand­ing on a stage in front of 1380 fel­low Python hack­ers hand­ing a big card­board check to a fan­tas­tic project?

Well, the returns are well worth it.

 

Preamble There's been some recent discussion about DjangoCon(.eu | .us) and whether or not speakers should have to pay for admission as well - see Chris Wanstrath's (of Github) tweets (here and here) and this Convore thread for examples. Obviously, as PyCon is the "big dog" so to speak for Python conferences, everyone looks to "us" for a model to work from, or how we manage things. I've seen a lot of poop slung towards the DjangoCon organizers, mainly due to a lack of knowing "why" certain policies (such as "Everyone Pays") exist for DjangoCon, PyCon, and other conferences. As co-chair and program committee chair last year, and program committee chair the year before, and now chair for the next two years - I figured it might be good to take a moment to explain the rationale behind PyCon's approach - as well as some statistics about the budget. I'm not going to state that this policy is perfect; nor that it won't be changed; I also will not release the budget publicly - I don't think giving everyone a spreadsheet without the context of the hundreds of man hours of work that go into it is useful, at all. Important Note: PyCon is organized and managed by the Python Software Foundation - this means that, as part of being a 501c3 charity, some of the financials from past PyCon is available as part of publicly accessible financial documents of the foundation. You can find those on the PSF's site. The same reasoning may not apply to a conference that is organized by a commercial entity or is done for profit. OSCON is a commercial conference, so having speakers get in free is generally expected. DjangoCon.us is in the middle - it is organized for profit by a commercial entity, but it also contributes heavily back to the Django Software Foundation. DjangoCon.eu is managed differently as well. Policy and Financial Aid First, what is the "policy" - well, first, it's not a policy per-se; it's part policy, and part tradition. The policy is "Everyone pays for a ticket" - attendees, tutorial presenters, organizers (meaning: all volunteers, including the chair) and sponsors - everyone pays their way. Yes, this means Van and myself both paid for our own tickets to attend. Everyone is treated as equal - sponsors get free admissions as part of conference sponsorship packages, and keynote speakers may be provided with either compensation or admission depending on the negotiated deal (some keynote speakers cost money, for example). Now; an interesting aspect of this is that PyCon, as a conference, offers a very generous financial aid program - this means that some attendees, speakers, tutorial presenters, etc have some, or in rare cases, all of their expenses such as flight, hotel and admission provided to them from the PyCon budget. PyCon goes out of it's way to encourage people to apply for financial aid - even if we can't cover all of your expenses, we will give you free admission based on need. The FA application process is simple, and straightforward. It's also very liberal - the only caveat is that speakers at the conference "get bumped to the top" of the applications so that we don't lose a good talk because of financial need. We also don't ban anyone from applying (for example, I needed assistance in 2010 even as the PC chair). We use the FA budget to not only help the "normal" attendees of the conference, we also keep an eye towards diversity - for example in 2010 we had a specific grant program (funded by Google) for women to attend PyCon - which they did in amazing numbers! We also try to help more people with less money than less people with more money - we want to spread assistance out as much as possible. This is why FA requires room-sharing at the conference hotel, this is why we may only cover part of a given applicant's costs - we want to help more people. As you can guess - since financial aid is a part of the budget, we allocate a set amount of money to this - but, without a solid budget (meaning, admission ticket sales, sponsorships, etc) we can't have it - it's actually a dice roll. We can guess at how much FA we can carve out of the budget at the start of the process, and we will award that amount - but that means if we have low attendance, don't book enough rooms, or our catering costs spike, or lack sponsors, the conference can lose not insignificant amounts of money helping people. The rub being, you don't know for sure if this will happen until the conference actually happens. So, how does "everybody pays" play into this? In two ways. First, it helps hedge our risk, institutionally speaking. PyCon had a good/bad year in 2009 - good for the attendees, but horrendously bad financially. We made various commitments in 2008 just as the markets were peaking, and we lost a lot of money when everything went south. Since then, it has been our budget policy to make sure that our revenues will cover our hard costs even if there is a 15% dip in attendance and a 35% dip in sponsorship. Second, you may have guessed that the "everybody pays" policy allows us to pad the financial aid budget. This has the direct benefit of bringing more people to the conference, increasing the diversity of people attending, getting a larger proportion of the community together, etc. I'm happy to say, that on most years, we very happily break our financial aid budget - meaning, if we have a positive outlook, we will gladly overspend on financial aid and take less "profit " for the conference. The point of the conference is the community, it's not about the conference! We help the community as much as we can by helping to cover the costs of people who would not otherwise be able to attend. History and Tradition Once you start organizing a conference you start to rapidly realize how costly things can get - and if you don't have sponsors with giant bags of money, or the conference is not being run for profit (such as OSCON), you can quickly get into trouble if you don't have a policy in place that will ensure financial viability. PyCon came from very small, humble beginnings but has grown year over year consistently - maintaining the "everyone helps, and everyone pays" tradition originally set forth. It is my understanding that the policy/tradition has as much to do with financials as it does with "the feel". No one is treated specially, we - meaning the community - put together the conference, we are taking the financial risk that comes with it. We are in it together, and that means "everyone helps, and everyone pays" - it is the most equitable solution that helps us maintain fairness and the flavor/feel of the conference. When you realize that even Guido has to buy a ticket (even if it was paid for by Google) or that Van Lindberg had to buy one - it suddenly makes you realize that all of us truly believe in the spirit of "we are all in this". Speakers; as a an additional guideline, while always paying for a ticket; always pay at the discounted early bird rate no matter when they register. So yes, we do discount them, but no more than anyone else who registers within the early bird window. As an aside, the "everybody helps" is also part of what makes PyCon special. When people come to other conferences, they frequently come expecting to be coddled and catered to. When people come to PyCon, we hope they come expecting to contribute. Having everybody contributing is at the core of the best parts of PyCon - from stuffing bags, to lightning talks, to the wonderful Testing in Python BOF. Hard Costs, Stats and Risk So what makes up a PyCon budget? Well - Van covered some of it in his wonderful "Behind the Scenes" post for PyCon 2011 - but in more detailed terms of percentages of the total costs for the budget: Catering (Food, beverages): 54% Networking: 5% Audio/Visual and Video Recording: 13% Payments to Tutorial Instructors: 6% Misc/PR/Sponsors and Administration: 16% Swag: 2% Financial Aid: 4% Catering, plus Financial Aid and video recording is 70% of the budget alone. The total value "spent" for financial aid alone well exceeds 50,000$ We spend a massive amount of money for audio/visual and the video recording making all of the talks available on the web (see the python miro community). Tens of thousands of dollars spent on networking. We could forgo feeding people - but with a conference that runs from 8am to 6pm for 5 days, that would suck - and people needing to leave to get food would be disruptive and ruin the flow. We could forgo recording the videos. We could do a lot of things to cut back and lower the budget numbers so we could give more away (such as comp'ing speaker tickets), but that doesn't make the risk and costs from the hotel go away. Average Revenue per attendee: ~$300 Average Cost per attendee: ~$465 In total - these costs (for 2011) came to well over 600,000$ - that's right. Over half a million dollars in hard costs for a conference of 1,380 Pythonistas. Much of the payments, guarantees, deposits, etc have to be put down up front of the actual conference with no guarantee that we will make our sponsorship or attendee numbers. That means, in the case of PyCon - the Python Software Foundation fronts potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments and risk. We also expect these to climb with the move of the conference to Santa Clara. Conferences are unknowns - you put up a lot of time, energy and money - lots of money - and you hope you hit certain numbers. For example, you make a contract with the hotel that says "we will have X number of people book X number of rooms nights" - if you don't meet those numbers? The hotel penalizes you a stunning amount of money. You make a contact for catering - saying that you will serve X number of meals - and if you don't hit that? You get penalized. You put a lot of faith in making numbers on: Sponsors - without corporate sponsors, we simply could not exist (at this scale), period. Attendee Numbers - You expect X number of attendees, broken up into "corporate, individual and Y" rates - corporate rate tickets are where you make the bulk of registration rates. Hotel Rooms - if you don't hit your contracted numbers, you will take a bath Do you know what happens if, for some reason - say an economic downturn - you don't make those numbers? Your conference loses over $230,000, possibly more. That 230k number? Right around the amount PyCon 2009 lost, representing a massive financial loss for the Python Software Foundation. Yes, you try to mitigate the risks by careful planning - if you're lucky, you get some insurance to cover some of the potential losses. PyCon is actually really lucky in all of this - we've grown enough that we get to leverage economies of scale with the contracts we deal with. Small conferences? Not so much - they get harder in the face of failure, and they don't have the bargaining power we have.. It's a delicate balancing act, requiring careful planning and a lot of work to drive attendance and sponsorship - negotiations with Hotels, Catering, Unions, are all things that have to go right in order to make a conference that even stands a chance of not losing you massive amounts of money. In the case of PyCon - a massive loss of money (such as 2009) could cause the foundation to go bankrupt and dissolve. As it is, the foundation, already spartan in spending cut back even further to protect itself which represents a net negative for the Python Community. Where does the profit go? Alright - I've outlined the philosophy, the scale and the risk. Now, you're probably asking where, if we have it, does any profit from the conference go? Easy - straight back into the community. Whatever profit - really, money left over, goes to cover the initial costs/risks for PyCon the next year, and the years after - it also goes to the Python Software Foundation that in turn, reinvests that money into the community (see the foundation blog). Having a healthy positive margin also means we can increase things such as the financial aid budget for the next year, allowing even more Python developers to attend. Why not run a budget that aims for 0$ +/-?! Because, that is simply insane - you can aim for minimal profit by reinvesting into things such as financial aid, or other perks for the attendees but only after you have guaranteed you're going to make your numbers - see the issue? At best, you budget is a highly refined series of educated guesses. At worst? Someone goes bankrupt - at smaller conferences such as DjangoCon.eu, where some costs and contracts are secured by an individual and their credit card? That person goes broke, because the entities you signed contracts with will get their money. So, you never, ever aim for a loss, but you also don't aim for extracting "maximum value" from conference attendees. You aim, you plan, and you hope to provide the best value and experience to attendees and sponsors - you do this through a lot of hard work and sweat. You make sure attendees walk away raving about the conference, you make sure you generate the maximum return on investment for the community. In Closing Historically, PyCon has never been aimed at "extracting money" from the community - it could be run a lot more profitably. We could increase ticket rates, reduce FA and walk around in Nascar-esque suits with sponsor logos on them - there's lots of things that could be done to make PyCon a massive profit center for the PSF. We don't though - why? Because, that defeats the purpose of a community conference, put together by and for the community. We take what money we end up with and we sponsor the sprints at PyCon itself, we hold the language and virtual machine summits. The PSF reinvests it into the Python community as a whole (see the sprints project, for example, or the 10,000$ check we gave to PyPy). The money is given out in the forms of developer grants, holding sprints, providing sponsorship to smaller Python conferences all over the world, outreach and education initiatives, etc. No one gets a shiny new car or anything - money that comes from the community conference goes back into the community. You can see how much goes where if you peruse the PSF resolutions page. PyCon is beginning to also outstrip the ability for a small group of volunteers to put together - more and more we've had to bring on commercial entities (whom we have to pay) to assist in organizing or doing specific things (such as registration, or website development). I fully expect PyCon 2012/2013 to quickly hit the attendance cap meaning we're going to have more scaling issues and higher costs - this is a fundamentally good thing - PyCon, it is felt, can sustain it's current feel and quality up to a maximum of 1500-2000 attendees. We do not have the intention of raising that cap. Instead, we - as the foundation - intend on encouraging smaller more regional conferences such as PyOhio to grow - PyCon will continue to be the "big dog" so to speak - but it being the big dog will allow us to further cultivate and pollenate the entire Python community and ecosystem. Given all of that - as the PyCon chair for the next two years - and being relatively comfortable that we will again, put on a highly successful conference - I am exploring the idea of steeply discounting the cost of tickets for speakers. I feel that not only is the conference viable once again, but that the speakers do help make the conference what it is - last year we had over 200 talk and tutorial submissions. All of those speakers submitted talks knowing that they would have to pay for a ticket to attend - but given the positive outlook, I'm comfortable in thinking that we will be able to provide accepted speakers with a discount to thank them for their talk. It's all about community, and reinvesting in it in the right places, at the right times, and managing your risk. The risks putting on a conference - even a small one (especially a small one) are massive, but the returns - especially when you're standing on a stage in front of 1380 fellow Python hackers handing a big cardboard check to a fantastic project? Well, the returns are well worth it.