In this inaugural episode of Conference Talk, we talk with Scott Vitale of PyColorado about his experience running a first-year conference and the budgetary aspects of a new event. Just how much does it cost to serve coffee to a whole conference? Listen now to find out this and everything else you’ll need to account for in your first conference.
Jon: Welcome to Conference Talk, the show where we take a backstage look at all your favorite tech conferences. My name is Jon Banafato, and here with me today is Scott Vitale. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott: Thanks, Jon. Great to be here.
Jon: Can you give us a little bit of background about yourself and what you do in the conference space?
Scott: Yeah, so along with Frank Valcarcel, I helped produce the very first PyColorado in 2019, so a regional Python developers conference that was really focused on bringing together some of the Python communities that exist along the front range in Colorado. So spanning from the Denver area up to Boulder, up to Fort Collins, down Fort Collins, or down to Colorado Springs down to Pueblo. We have a pretty diverse, both geographically and topic oriented, community of Python developers. So we wanted to really bring everyone together in one space and meet each other, because that’s something that we don’t get an opportunity to do very often.
Jon: How did you get the idea for PyColorado? Where did this all come together? It’s a big jump from your local Python meetup to a conference the size of that.
Scott: I mostly blame it on Frank, and he would probably laugh to hear me say that. He and I met at PyCon one year, PyCon US and hit it off right away. We’re both from Colorado and just started talking about different things that we wanted to do, different things we were interested in at the time. I was organizing the Boulder Python meetup. So I already had some experience with the Colorado community of Pythonistas, and Frank and I got talking actually during some of the pitches. If you know, at Python US, they have pitches for all of the regional conferences where the conference organizer or someone from the conference will get up and talk about their conference and what makes their conference special and encourage people to submit talks very often.
Scott: Frank turned to me during the pitches and he said, “Why don’t we have one? Why doesn’t Colorado have a regional conference?” It just struck a nerve with me because I agree with him 100%. There’s all these amazing conferences that take place on the West Coast, PyCascades, North Bay Python, PyBay, and then the Midwest is full of them as well. You’ve got PyOhio and PyTennessee. Python US was held in Cleveland for a couple of years sequentially, so lots of great … Not to mention PyTexas in the South. Then of course on the East Coast, there’s huge Python membership groups in Boston and New York. PyGotham as you well know, Jon, is a big one as well. So really, all regions of the US have these really vibrant Python communities, and we felt left out. We felt like Colorado should have one, and we didn’t understand why we didn’t have one.
Jon: Thank you for bringing the Python conference space to Colorado. That’s awesome. About how long did that take, right? You saw all these, I forget how many, people go up there these days, but 20 or so conference organizers pitching their events. What was the time span between that and PyColorado?
Scott: That conversation happened in 2017. We were, at that point, a little over two years out from when we ended up having PyColorado, and some of that was purposeful. We wanted to take our time and really understand the landscape. Frank was planning on attending a number of these other regional conferences as well. So he went and took notes about what he was seeing and what worked and what didn’t work, what he liked. We spent some time really investigating what the space looked like, what things we wanted to emulate, what things we wanted to change, make our own. So planning really kicked off, I would say, in earnest right around PyCon 2018, so about a year and a half out from when we had PyColorado.
Jon: Big question is, how did it go? What was the event like?
Scott: I think it went great, of course. I have to say that, I guess.
Jon: You’re biased. I’m biased about PyGotham. It’s all we’re all biased about our own events.
Scott: Yeah. Earnestly speaking, I felt like everything went really, really well, especially for a first-year conference. It can be such a stressful experience. Fortunately, some of my background was actually in the conference space. I worked at a company called Spigot Labs that built event technology for conferences specifically. So I’d been to enough and I’d seen behind the scenes enough at some of these conferences that I had at least some idea of what I was walking into. I think Frank, as a business owner and an entrepreneur, I think he also had … was set up pretty well to deal with some of the problems you run into in organizing a conference.
Scott: I think we didn’t entirely know what we were getting into, but we were really, really excited with how it turned out. A big part of that was we really made a list of the things that we absolutely had to have, our MVP of the conference, and essentially worked out from there. So we attacked it just like we would any other software project and really only added things as we had the ability to both financially and in terms of our time and resources.
Jon: Financially, you’re really hitting on the topic here today. I am really interested in breaking down some of the costs of it and figuring out where all that money goes. Right off the bat, what was the final bill? What was that check for?
Scott: Our final budget was a total of $61,500. Interestingly enough, I think that number is pretty common in the other conference organizers that I’ve talked to first year conferences that were about our size. So we ended up with around 250 attendees and a handful of vendors and sponsors. I can’t remember exactly what our speaker count was. I think he was around 20 speakers in total. For that size conference, that type of budget is pretty typical.
Jon: Yeah, that certainly aligns with my own experience and what I’ve heard from others as well. I think that probably sounds like a ton of money to a lot of people, especially … I mean, PyColorado is a volunteer run conference, right, like a lot of these other Python conferences.
Scott: Yeah, 100% of us were volunteers, right? We had a core staff of about eight people that were in charge of basically making the whole thing happen. Of course, we had some contractors that took care of specific things that we hired for specific roles. But in terms of organizers, people making choices about what happened at the conference, we were all volunteers. We were all very, very busy volunteers.
Jon: Yeah. That’s a ton of money to raise on a spare time, volunteer run effort. What actually does that cost break down to? Where does the money end up going? Because at the end of the day, there’s probably not a lot different between what you bring in, what you pay out, right?
Scott: Yeah. For us, we basically broke even, which was an awesome place to be for a first year conference. We couldn’t be happier with breaking even. The conference was going to happen one way or the other. We were convinced that it was the right thing to do. But looking at some of the big costs on the budget sheet, of course the venue is the biggest item by far. Our venue, we held it at The Studio Loft, which is part of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Part of our reasoning there was we wanted … This was one of our must haves. We wanted a venue that had a lot of character, and we didn’t want it to be in a sterile hotel. Not to dog hotel conferences too much, but especially for a first year, we wanted it to be a space where people came and felt like it was a memorable experience from the very first touch.
Scott: So we looked at a number of different venues. Our big things were we wanted it to be downtown, so people could easily walk to hotels as well as walk to restaurants and bars. We wanted coffee shops easily available for folks that wanted to step out and work for a bit, and we wanted the space to be really comfortable. We wanted it to be a comfortable place to chat with others and grab a cup of coffee and have a snack. We want it to be a comfortable space for the speakers. We wanted it to be a good space for the vendors and sponsors as well.
Scott: Yeah, we were looking for something very communal. We didn’t want something like a university where we’d be split out into a number of different rooms. We wanted it to be one big, comfortable space where we could really have an intimate experience with everyone there, and so we paid for that. We could have gone to a university and gotten it a lot cheaper, but The Studio Loft was a very nice compromise. It was significantly cheaper than a hotel would have been. Frank had been to a conference that was held there previously, a JavaScript conference. So we knew that it fit the vibe and the overall feel of a community conference. So we pumped down 32 grand to the venue.
Jon: Like half your budget right there.
Scott: Yeah.
Jon: That’s quite a bit. What does that all include? I mean, is it just the physical space and you’re renting everything from chairs to coffee cups to whatever else might be there, or is it an all-inclusive deal?
Scott: Yeah. That was also one of the reasons why we went with The Studio Loft, was they included some of those big things. They included all of the chairs. They included the podium. They included some basic AV, so we didn’t have to bring in someone to do microphones, the microphone for the speaker, as well as microphone for asking questions. They covered a lot of those things. Those were included in the base venue costs, but a big portion of that, when you look at that 32,000, I think 80% of that was actually spent on catering.
Jon: That’s your big line item, is these two things together. You’ve got all your physical space and then whatever else is included that makes it usable as a conference center, right?
Scott: Yeah. I mean, for the most part. That’s the biggest ticket item by far. We spent just under seven grand to have all of the talks recorded, have a videographer record the talks and post produce them and upload them to YouTube. So that was a sizeable chunk as well. I’m looking down the list of line items and pretty much everything else on here is like sub $1,000. So everything else is pretty okay, pretty tolerable. Then you see that venue/catering item and it’s like, holy cow.
Jon: Yeah. I mean, that’s a … it’s a ton of money for getting a bunch of people in a room together for a couple of days, right?
Scott: Yeah.
Jon: All right, so we’ve got your venue and food together. That comes to 32,000. Most of that is food, right? It’s not cheap to feed 250 people. You’ve got your videography for, you said, 7,000. That brings us about two thirds of the way of your total costs. Is there anything else that stands out on that list of major expenses?
Scott: Looking down the list, it’s a lot of small stuff, what I consider small stuff. So just think about all the things that add up to the overall experience. We had some swag. We had t-shirts and stickers that were … The t-shirts, we sold to attend attendees at cost, but of course still part of the budget. Stickers, lanyards, badges. We had a small opening reception, so that was another catering item that wasn’t included with the venue. We ended up having a very nice speaker dinner for our 20-ish speakers. So that was a pretty sizable, almost three grand cost there. Yeah, it was spread out between a variety of things. We had some printed signs that we had to get made. We had some swag bags that we bought, the hosting costs for the website. So yeah, it breaks down into a lot of these small buckets that don’t … they don’t really seem like all that much individually, but you really need at least most of them to put on a conference.
Jon: If nothing else, you’re making it a really memorable experience for, not just the attendees, but the speakers. They’re going to want to come back and give another talk because PyColorado was great, and come do that speaker dinner again, that kind of thing?
Scott: Yeah, and that was a big part of it for us too, is the speakers that come to these Python conferences, I think all of the pipeline conferences are the same way. The speakers are not paid any stipend for being there. I think some conferences are nice enough to pay for some of their travel or lodging, but for us, we were asking these folks to take time out of their busy schedule. Our conference was on a weekend. So we were asking them to take time away from their family and come to Colorado and give a talk, and essentially not be compensated for it. A big part of it for us was to make sure that they knew how appreciated they were and how important it was to us that they were there and that they got to experience the conference, and we got to experience them at the conference.
Jon: Yeah. It’s hard to find any time to actually be at a conference you’re running yourself, right?
Scott: Yeah, it is very difficult. For anyone who has gotten married, I would say it’s very similar to that experience of you had a wedding, there are pictures to prove it, but it’s difficult to recall even a single conversation when you think back.
Jon: That is a pretty common thing I’ll tell people when they ask about running conferences, is well, imagine if you got 10 or 12 programmers together and said, “Hey, put on a wedding for two days straight.” That’s usually what community organized conferences tend to look like.
Scott: Yeah. It’s a very, very similar picture for sure.
Jon: You touched on this a little bit already, but I wanted to revisit it because I think it’s going to be interesting to a lot of people. 60 grand’s a lot of money. You mentioned you could have gone to a local university and maybe reduce those costs a bit. How much can that reduce the cost? What are some of the other options you looked at and ultimately decided against, but maybe other folks might want to lower that bottom line a little bit?
Scott: We considered … one of the places we looked at was Metro State University, which is also here in Denver. It’s a little bit south of downtown, so it’s not quite as walkable. They have a student union that has a number of meeting spaces that would work well for a conference. I’ve been to one other conference there. We looked at that space and price wise, the venue cost was significantly lower, maybe two or three grand for the space by itself, but it essentially included nothing, right? You had to rent all your tables and chairs and any kind of speaker podium and you kind of AV. So there were a lot of add-ons that were variable costs. Then, like I said, a big part of it for us was the feel of being all in one big space and having everyone close together, which is like, it feels so funny to say that in the time of COVID, right?
Scott: I watch a movie with a concert. I’m like, “Oh God, why are those people standing so close?” But ultimately, we did want to encourage that close comradery and experience. In a space like Metro State, you could have that within the rooms where the speakers were, but as soon as you stepped out into the hallway, you were in essentially a student union. People could gather in places and alcoves and that sort of thing, but there was not really a communal space to hang out. So I think we could have certainly saved some costs there. Catering wise, we would have had to bring in all outside catering.
Scott: So again, the price probably would have been a little cheaper, but it would have been more work on our part too. We would have had to physically go and get that stuff and bring it in. So for us, it was a trade off of two things, right, the cost, as well as how much overhead and effort was it going to take for us. Also, what was the end experience like? So it was those three things that we were balancing and juggling between.
Jon: If I’m starting my very first conference, right, and I have more time than money, I can probably save $10, $15,000 on go with an outside vendor, go with a less ideal venue, but we’ll still have a place where we can host our talks.
Scott: Yeah, and for us, when we looked at that, we looked at that difference in price. By the way, I think that estimate is right on. I think that’s exactly right. For us, that’s essentially like the cost of one sponsor. We were in a place where we would much rather spend the time and effort to bring on one more sponsor and have the conference in a space that we really loved. So it’s like, where do you spend your time, right? For us, spending time bringing on one more sponsor was worth it.
Jon: No, absolutely. I mean, that is a great way to think about it, and I think probably something that eludes a lot of people on their first go round. Since you brought up sponsorship, what does your breakdown look like for income, sponsorship, ticket sales? I’m assuming there’s some other miscellaneous things that brought in some money.
Scott: Yeah. From the sponsorship side of things … I think we were around 25 K non-sponsored income. That includes sales of conference tickets, sales of workshop tickets. We did one day of workshops prior to the conference that were focused, half day workshops where an individual speaker covered a topic in depth for a class of … I think we limited our classes to 20 or 25 people. So between conference tickets and workshop tickets and the t-shirts that we sold, which again essentially we’re just selling those a cost. Then we also got a grant from the PSF, which is something that any Python organizer specifically should absolutely know about.
Scott: The Python software foundation, in addition to running PyCon US, which is their biggest event of the year, they also provide grants to all kinds of events and organizations and groups. It includes things like regional conferences. So based on the number of people that we had coming for the regional conference and based on what types of things we were providing, in our case, it was talks as well as a educational component, the workshop component, the PSF offered us a grant of $3,800. So that was a nice little piece of income that came directly from the Python community. All that to say, we had about 25,000 in income that was non-sponsored based. Then we had about 50,000 in income that was specifically from sponsorships.
Jon: Got it. So you’ve got two thirds of your income is coming from sponsorship, and that’s essentially subsidizing your ticket sales and things like that.
Scott: Yeah. For us, and I think many Python conferences run this way, the sponsorship is really what we use to pay for 90% of the costs. In fact, we got that tip from the North Bay Python guys. I talked to Chris and Josh. I think this was in 2018, and they gave a talk at PyCon US about organizing a conference. I was like, oh, how pertinent is this? But one of the things they specifically talked about was that they build their entire budget at the beginning of the year, based around their expected sponsorship levels. Essentially, ticket sales just become a bonus on top.
Scott: It goes back to the MVP concept, right? You have your MVP conference based on your sponsor sales. If you get additional sponsors or you end up selling more tickets than you expected to, then that’s a little bit more money that you can apply towards add-ons, things that are a bonus on top. That’s a long way of saying that that’s exactly what we try to do as well, right? We tried to focus mostly on sponsorships and set our conference prices low for the individual tickets, make sure that everyone that could attend and wanted to attend would be able to, and essentially use the sponsorship money to subsidize that.
Jon: That’s great. Yeah. I want to take a quick detour into some very specific line items into your budget, because I think other folks will benefit from hearing about this. The first is what was your biggest surprise cost?
Scott: Believe it or not, the big thing that shocked us was the cost of coffee. I don’t know about you, Jon, I’m a huge coffee drinker. I basically drink it from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. For me, going to a conference, especially a conference that I was running, having a constant supply of coffee was a requirement. It was something that was on our must have list. We must have a venue that has character. We must have all day coffee. So it started off as one of our key things, one of the things that we were trying to deliver on without a doubt, and when I saw the price of coffee, I was mortified. The cost of providing all day coffee for two days was four grand.
Jon: That’s a lot of cups of coffee.
Scott: Four grand, so that’s … The budget’s only 55, so we’re spending nearly 10% of our budget on just coffee.
Jon: Well, it was probably well worth it if it kept you going during the whole thing.
Scott: It was good coffee. To be honest, I got up in my opening talk welcoming people to the conference, and that was one of the things I highlighted. I said, “We have brought you nothing but the best. We have brought you whole-day coffee.”
Jon: Out of curiosity, where did the coffee come from? Was that through the venue as well, or did you find a local shop or a roaster?
Scott: Yeah, so unfortunately we had to run it through the venue and through their internal catering company, so-
Jon: Catering contracts, right?
Scott: Yeah, so it was, it was Illy Coffee, which I’m not opposed to, but unfortunately we couldn’t go with a small local roaster.
Jon: We’ll do an episode someday just about catering contracts, because I think that so many things get dictated by that.
Scott: Well, and I think that’s … I mean, I joke about the coffee thing, but that is the big shock in all of this. Even in someone that knows the conference space reasonably well, the amount of time and effort that goes into dealing with the venue and the catering is just shocking, just absolutely shocking, and we had it easy. We had a venue that was reasonably priced. We had a venue manager who was incredible. He was very good at drilling down to exactly what we needed, not wasting a lot of time. In fact, when it came to some of the other catering costs in terms of food, we didn’t provide meals, but we provided a light breakfast and then snacks throughout the day.
Scott: We told them some of our important things were to have not just your hotel continental breakfast, but actually have some protein and some fruit and have some good snacks for folks. He was really good about just working it and making it come together. We told them what price we wanted to pay. We told him what things were important to us, and he figured out how to make it all work. We had it easy and it was still a tremendous effort.
Jon: Your catering budget then. I think I missed this before, you didn’t have full meals. You didn’t have a seated lunch or anything like that.
Scott: We did not, yeah.
Jon: So you spent 80% of 31, right? That’s like $24,000 on catering for light breakfast and an afternoon snack, so that sort of thing?
Scott: Yeah. Well, and four grand, that was coffee.
Jon: So a full 25% nearly of your catering budget was your unlimited coffee.
Scott: Yeah, it’s pretty shocking. Our conference was relatively small. We had like 250 people.
Jon: You scale that up to something like PyCon or even go bigger, OSCON, or one of the non-tech ones, an enormous amount of coffee.
Scott: Yeah, it’s pretty nuts. For some of those conferences having fancy catered meals as well, right, the cost of catering just blows up in such a hurry.
Jon: On the flip side of, or I guess in a similar vein, it’s not really a flip side, I think you’d probably argue that the coffee that you paid for was definitely worth it. Was there anything else on your list there that sounds really expensive, but was totally worth it?
Scott: One of the snacks, and again, I hand this to my venue manager, Javier. He was the man. One of our snacks on Saturday was this decadent cheese plate. It was like I don’t even know how many kinds of cheese, but it was impressive enough that not only did we hear about it Saturday afternoon, we heard people raving about this cheese plate. It showed up in our post event surveys. We had people … One of the questions was, “What was your favorite thing about PyColorado?” We had people answer that with, “The cheese plate was incredible.” So again, it’s funny to talk about it, but it’s something that people walked away with. It was something that people felt was special about our event. I hope that they enjoyed the talks as well, but I’m more than happy that they enjoyed at least the cheese plate.
Jon: Well, so I mean really what you’re buying there is an experience, right? If what people are walking away with is, I really remembered that cheese plate, it’s not the cheese itself. It’s being at this Python conference.
Scott: Yeah, and I think that’s the thing that we’re all shooting for. People talk about the hallway track at conferences as well. All the time spent meeting other Python developers and seeing people that you know, but haven’t seen in a long time. There’s just … I think, especially in the Python community, there’s so much more that is that conference experience beyond just the scheduled content.
Jon: Yeah, I would totally agree with that. Now on the flip side of both of those questions, was there anything that you regretted not paying enough for? What should people who are starting a conference definitely not cheap out on?
Scott: We were also very happy to pay for the videographer. I think that was money well spent. I debated doing something ourselves, doing a DIY video, recording and production, and I’m so glad I didn’t. In terms of hard lessons, I think the only hard lesson we had was, don’t try to organize three food trucks for lunch. So on Saturday, on the Saturday launch, although we weren’t catering lunch, we arranged to have three food trucks come and post up outside, and basically be there for a quick and easy lunch for attendees. That just turned into way more of a headache than we ever expected. So lots of options, I would not recommend food trucks.
Jon: Is that something might be worth trading that, like time for money in the future?
Scott: Yeah, absolutely, or again, since we were downtown and everything was very close and walkable, even just lining up some predefined reservations with restaurants or discounts with certain restaurants. I think that would even be preferable just because they’re used to servicing a big load of people at lunchtime.
Jon: Sure. I mean, you’re unleashing 250 people-
Scott: All at once.
Jon: … all go eat right now. That’s a lot to handle. How did you handle all the money? You had something like $75,000 coming in and 60 plus going out. That’s a bunch of money to keep in your personal bank account.
Scott: We had an awesome hack for this. I’m very excited about how this worked out. I would recommend it 100% to anyone running a conference, not even a first-year conference, anyone running a conference. We actually got introduced by another conference organizer to a woman named Laura Wickett who runs a company called Conference Ops. She basically started working in the DevOps space. So there are all these DevOps days and DevOps based conferences, and they had the same problem that we all have, which is a lot of money coming in and out. You have to have some level of management in terms of tracking what people are spending, and reimbursements, and making sure that all that money ends up where it needs to be.
Scott: So she essentially started a company doing just the accounting side of conference work. The big benefit there is that you don’t actually have to … Well, first off, you don’t have to deal with any of the money yourself. You have someone else who’s essentially the holder of it all, but we also didn’t have to set up any conference bank account. We didn’t have to set up a nonprofit. We did have an LLC that we set up, a Colorado LLC just to manage. Some contracts require a signature from an LLC or from some kind of company. So there were, some reasons why we had to set up the LLC, but we didn’t have to deal with any of the money, accounting the reimbursements, the taxes at the end of the year. We didn’t have to touch a bit of it.
Scott: Laura is great to work with. It was funny because we were introduced to her, as I said, by another conference organizer. She’s actually someone that I knew in college, just totally a small world situation. So I’ve known Laura for a very long time. I did not know she was doing this for a living. I hadn’t talked to her in probably close to 20 years, and so I got to reintroduce myself to her, and we got a really amazing service for PyColorado as a result.
Jon: Awesome, because you don’t have to deal with any of the nitty gritty details. As someone who’s done the filing taxes bit, it’s the not fun part of running the conference.
Scott: Yeah.
Jon: Because I know people are going to be curious. There’s got to be a time and money trade off there too, right? What’s the ballpark of how much you might pay out of your conference budget to have all that handled for you?
Scott: Her fee is 6% of your gross. That worked out to about $3,500.
Jon: Do you have to have a sponsor?
Scott: Yeah, exactly, calculated number of sponsors. For us, it was beneficial as well because we didn’t … You can definitely go the nonprofit route, which is difficult and time consuming. That will work out nicely for you come tax time. But if you go the easy route and you do just an LLC, then you end up with pass through income that affects your individual taxes. So that was definitely something that we wanted to avoid as the two co-producers of the event. So this was like, this checked so many boxes for us in terms of time and money and effort, and just made things super, super easy.
Jon: What’s changing for next time?
Scott: Yeah. I mean, I think the tricky thing right now is of course, our situation with COVID-19 global pandemic. I think you are one of the brave souls that continued and put on a virtual conference in the wake of this mess, and I think we’re all learning right now. I think both the virtual conference organizers and the in-person conference organizers are paying close attention and taking a lot of notes over how the space is evolving. I’m not a believer that when we come out of it, most conferences will be 100% virtual. I think many conferences, probably the vast majority will have some level of virtual component. I think hybrid is the magic word, and there’ll be some balance between how hybrid is this conference, right? So I think the landscape is going to change drastically between now and when we start having these conferences again.
Scott: Of course, it’s a little difficult to account for some of those things, although I do think that some of the accessibility pieces are really appealing. Being able to not only have your close community, have your people that all live close to Colorado and have traveled to Colorado, but also extending that and including people from other parts of the US and around the world, people who either couldn’t travel or are just interested in some of the talks, or interested in some of the content that’s being provided. I think finding a way to incorporate some of those virtual pieces is going to be important to me in the next go round.
Scott: I think some of the other things that come to mind are things that we fell short on this time around. We discussed providing some level of childcare. Again, our conference is held on weekends. For people that have families, that have young children, it’s a stretch and it’s a difficulty and it’s a challenge to get there. So we looked at some other conferences that had provided some level of either a junior track, a children’s track, or some level of babysitting. I think that, especially in this modern world, is absolutely key to really reaching your entire audience, so we definitely like to focus on that.
Scott: Then also in terms of accessibility, I feel like offering scholarships to people and offering travel stipends to folks that can’t afford to travel on their own, I think that is something that we all feel very strongly about. It’s a matter of both figuring out how to pay for that probably from a sponsorship type perspective, but also figuring out what the process is for choosing those people. I feel like I want to help folks come and have this experience with us, but I also know that it’s going to be so difficult to look through a stack of applications and try to pick out the ones that we’re going to award with scholarships. So I think that’s a goal that we feel strongly about, but it’s also one that’s a little more difficult to plan out, a little more difficult to really nail down.
Scott: Then if I think of some of the choices we made and what we would change, there’s not a whole lot. I think we would actually use this … we would use the same venue again. I think I would absolutely request the cheese plate again. It’s definitely on my list. I think we’d make a few tweaks to our speaker lounge and our breakout area where people could go and pop up their laptop, some minor things like that. But ultimately, we were really happy with the vibe and with the interactions that we got and the feedback of people after the event. So I think in many ways we’re going to do all the same stuff and just try to add on a few more of those things that mean a lot to us.
Jon: My final question is, do you have any advice for people planning out their first conference budgets right now? Obviously, doing a virtual conference versus an in-person conference is going to look very differently. They’re going to have some things in common. But from your experience doing PyColorado, in person and in a big venue altogether, what would you tell someone looking to do an event like yours?
Scott: The number one thing is you are not alone. Jon, when you and I first got on a call a couple of months ago, I think that was my realization of that phrase. That I was on this call with a number of other Python community conference organizers, and we all had a very similar shared experience. It was both cathartic looking back at Colorado, and it was also something that really opened a door that I should have known was there, but I didn’t really, in that we’ve all been through this before. We’ve all had to solve a lot of the same problems. So if you’re organizing your very first conference, or you’re organizing your 10th conference, the community of conference organizers is powerful and broad.
Scott: There were so many people that we leaned on as part of PyColorado. I mentioned talking with Josh and Chris about North Bay Python. We had Dustin Ingram from PyTexas. He was one of our speakers. He runs PyTexas as well. Then we got all sorts of feedback from people that had been through it before. We connected with Ewa Jodlowska, who runs PyCon US. She’s the director of the PSF. She was one of our keynote speakers and provided some great feedback on our first conference. Having her there was super, super special, and just being able to reach out to other organizers. Not just Python organizers, we got our first budget from a JavaScript organizer that runs conferences in town. We looked at a number of talk submission platforms that were used by another conference organizer that I knew that was based here in Denver that runs iOS conferences.
Scott: I guess the net of it is no matter what kind of conference you’re running, there are so many tools and so many questions to figure out that you don’t really have to figure out. There they’re out there and people are willing to share them. We’re all super willing and excited to share them. That goes for all of our stuff as well, right? We talked very transparently about our budget costs and what went into it. I would be happy to take that exact sheet and send it to any conference organizer to dig through and figure out for themselves, because it’s just we’re all trying to accomplish the same thing. We’re all trying to bring together these communities that are important to us, and so much of it is done already. In fact, I mean, Jon, you sent me your GitHub repo of little utilities to do all sorts of random PyGotham things. I have one of my own as well. So it’s like there are all these pieces that you don’t think of.
Jon: Yeah. Well, I think that is a wonderful note to leave on. There are a lot of us out here. We’re all in this together. We want to see everybody create these great community events. Before we go, any parting words, anything to pitch?
Scott: I don’t think I have a pitch right now.
Jon: Great.
Scott: Ordinarily, I’d say, “Oh, the next PyColorado is on this date. We would love to see you there.” But no, I mean, my parting pitch is really just everyone stay safe and take care of yourself during this crazy, crazy time. Keep in mind that we will all come together again. We’ll all get to enjoy these types of events and enjoy each other’s company and enjoy the camaraderie that goes along with it. It’s just a matter of when, and that’s something we can all wait for.
Jon: Awesome. Thanks for being on the show. Where can we find you online?
Scott: I am svvitale at literally every platform under the sun. I’d suggest following me on Twitter. That’s probably where I’m most active. Yeah, feel free to reach out anytime directly. I always like to talk to people that are working on something new, or have an idea, or want to run something by me. So I would love to hear from you and hear your ideas and figure out if I can help at all, so.
Jon: Cool. Thanks, well, we’ll have you back soon.
Scott: Awesome. Thanks Jon.
Jon: Thanks Scott.