[Conferences] Pycon for Antananarivo

[Chad Cooper]

Dina,

Hello. I have been working with pyArkansas <http://www.pyarkansas.org/> for
a few years now and can give you some advice on funds, facility, and
promotion.

Starting out, you should try to keep things as cheap as possible, as in
free if you can, it will make things much easier on you. For a location to
 hold you event, for instance, try to find a local university computer
science department that you can team up with that will let you use their
facilities - we did this for pyArkansas for the first four years and it
worked out great. Getting students and faculty involved will be a win for
everyone. If you cannot find a free facility, that will be you biggest
expense more than likely.

For fund raising, reach out to the Python community, you will be amazed at
how giving they are. Be aware that this takes time, patience, and fortitude
on your part; do not wait until the last minute to do this, get started as
early as possible. Also, local tech companies, especially those using
Python, are usually interested in sponsoring events. Draft up a sponsor
prospectus (we modeled ours after
PyCon's<https://us.pycon.org/2013/sponsors/prospectus/>)
that you can present to potential sponsors, this will tell them who you
are, what they get out of sponsoring, and what you would like to see from
them  $$ wise - they need a target dollar amount that you are wanting to
get from them. Plus it saves you sending the same thing out over and over.

Promotion: Twitter helped us reach a previous untapped group of folks just
one state over this past year for pyArkansas. Use Twitter to you advantage.
You can also get your event posted to the front page of python.org and get
it added to the list of pycons on the PSF blog. Email this list to get that
done. If you have speakers in mind that you would like to invite, then do
it - email them and ask them to come, many of them will. Send out
announcements to local/regional/national listserves about your event - and
not just Python lists, send it out to Linzx user groups, database user
groups, .NET user groups - there are people all over that will be
interested. Finally, get a website for your event. 2012 was the first year
pyArkansas had a "real" site, and it helped tremendously. We are running
Symposion <http://pinax.github.com/symposion/> by Eldarion, and it's
awesome (and what the main PyCon site runs on).

HTH, if you have any more specific questions, let us know.

chad



On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:28 PM, Ralainirina Dina Randriantsizafy <
tatikatra at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Dear Andrew Svetlov,
>
> At this point I have three quetions;
> 1. Do we have to establish a formal association for pycon in Antananarivo
> 2. Can we legally use the name pycon for the conferences or is it a free
> to use name
> 3. About the money, how do you pay the conference room, the advertinsing
> in news paper, ...
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dina
>   ------------------------------
> *From:* Andrew Svetlov <andrew.svetlov at gmail.com>
> *To:* Ralainirina Dina Randriantsizafy <tatikatra at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* "conferences at python.org" <conferences at python.org>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, November 13, 2012 6:44 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [Conferences] Pycon for Antananarivo
>
> What do you like to know?
> I'm coorganizer of ua.pycon.org and I will be happy to share our
> experience.
> Your questions?
>
> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Ralainirina Dina Randriantsizafy
> <tatikatra at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I am a Physicists and Programming lecturer using and teaching Python. I
> > would like to know how to organize Pycon conference, we want to organize
> one
> > in Antananarivo.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Dina
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Python Conferences mailing list: Conferences at python.org
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/conferences
> >
> > This is an open list with open archives; sensitive or confidential
> > information should not be discussed here.
>
>
>
> --
> Thanks,
> Andrew Svetlov
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Python Conferences mailing list: Conferences at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/conferences
>
> This is an open list with open archives; sensitive or confidential
> information should not be discussed here.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/conferences/attachments/20121116/4a5bafe3/attachment.html>