EPS General Assembly
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Lemburg, Marc-Andre
EPS General Assembly This is where the EuroPython Society (EPS) board gives its reports, resolutions are passed and the EPS members can vote in a new EPS board
 to the public. This is the official part of the EPS. To be honest, it's a bit boring, but nothing much we can do. We have this agenda in the bylaws, and so we need to do it this way. Do we have the EPS members all sitting here? We have a lot of people who are not here. We have a lot of people who are not here. If the voting EPS members please sit in the first few rows so that it's easier for us to basically do the voting. And then, of course, everyone else is welcome to join. We don't have anything to hide. And if you find this interesting, then you can sign up to become an EPS member afterwards, of course. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Unfortunately, we have a number of people who are not here at the conference. So, I'm going to try to use Skype to basically join them here. Okay. He's not answering. So, let's just go ahead. Okay. So, first of all, welcome to all the new EPS members that we have. We signed up a couple of more EPS members in recent weeks. We now have 182 members. We have a number of EPS members. We have a number of EPS members in recent weeks. Okay. So, we have a number of EPS members. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. that we have and we need then two checkers of the minutes. So basically, okay, Stefan will do the minutes and then we need two checkers. Basically say that, okay, these minutes are correct. Daria and Wells Christian. So the first task for Stefan would be to now note the names of the two checkers, the secretary and himself. Do you need a piece of paper? And normally the chairperson of the meeting also does the voting. So Alexander, the first thing that you have to do is you have to establish, we have to have an emotion establishing the timeliness of the call of the General Assembly and then we need to vote on that. So just to maybe as reminder or introduction to how this works, timeliness of the call, the bylaws say that we have to call for the General Assembly 14 days before the actual General Assembly and up to five days before the General Assembly, we can make changes to the agenda and the suggestions from the board or board candidates. Sorry, was it the secretary? Yes, that's fine. I'm not prepared, I did too much party work. I'm sorry. It was, yeah, so we had a timely, is anybody saying that you did not call for this meeting in time? No, so I can say the meeting was called timely. Wait, abstentions. Oh, okay, we have to do all the voting, sorry. It's the usual kind of process. Anyone against? Abstain, anyone? Who's saying everything was in time? Lost in time, yes. Like abstains? So we have like your thing? Huh? You're not, like you say yes. Yeah, okay, that's true. Stefan, what you also need is we need a list of all the EPS members who have attended the General Assembly. So please pass around a piece of paper. 15 people in the meeting here, right? No, 16, sorry. Okay, so I think we managed that part. So let's go to the next one. As far as I see, everybody said yes. Is it abstain? No, just like for double checking. No, 16, yes. Okay, so the next thing is the annual report by the board. So this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to show you the preliminary results from 2016, the actual 27 timeline, not the one that I just showed in the previous talk, and then how we're going to move on. So these are the preliminary results from 2016. Preliminary because we don't have the complete, we've not gone through the complete balance sheet with the local organization, the ACPYSS in from Bilbao yet. But this is what they reported to us. So the conference made a profit of 71,481.55 euros. This currently includes 17,920 euros pending sponsor payments. So they are still having issues getting all the sponsors to actually pay. We've done a round of emails, so we managed to get a few of them to pay, but this amount is still basically blocked. If we do get all the sponsor payments, of course, the EPS share will be 50%, and then we'll get 35,740 and 77 cents from the ACPYSS, and that will go towards the EPS budget that we have. If you compare that to the previous years, it's a little lower than 2016, and the reason being that for 2017, we basically spent a bit more money on nice things like, for example, the booths that we had in Bilbao. This was actually a good investment because we had lots of sponsors who really liked those booths, and they signed up again for this year, so it made a lot of sense to do this investment. Yes? Sorry? Why did you add that? Ah, sorry, yes, yes, yes. You're right, 2015. Let me just fix that. OK, I can fix it later. There you go. Compared to 2014, it's a much better result, and as you can see, we're actually getting some money into basically work on the mission, the new mission that we have that we want to support other organizations in Europe. Right now, we're still the, OK, what we have in the bank right now is what we had in the bank because we gave a loan to the local organization for this year. We had in the bank about 46,000, and 40,000 we basically gave a loan to the Python Italia organization so that they can basically finance the initial contract payments that we had to do for this venue. So let's have a look at the actual timeline of 2017. So in last year in July, we had the election of the new board, and August to October, we did the selection process. The selection process took longer than expected because we had a few issues with the venues that we originally had chosen or looked at. Let's put it that way. So originally, the idea was to do it in Como or do it in Milano. This didn't work out because the costs were literally twice as much as what we pay here, and so it wouldn't have been sustainable. So we couldn't do it, so we had to go and then find new locations and Christian then identified some more. It was I think Genoa, Ricione and Rimini, and another one, I think those three. And then eventually, we then decided to go with Rimini. We had another candidate, which was Brno in the Czech Republic, but the problem there was that the venue did not really, I mean, the venue was a nice venue and it had enough rooms, but there was no room that was available for doing large plenary sessions. So they had a room which was very, very long, and so the people in the back wouldn't have been able to see the screen in the front, and so that was a pity. So this is always important when you go to, when you select venues, that you always have to make sure that everything is actually suited for a conference of this size. Anyway, so we decided on Rimini, and then we started the whole process of basically getting everything going with the contract and so on. We launched the preview website early on, but we did not put any dates on it, and the reason was that we had of course not signed the contract yet. We started the negotiations with the venue in November, and it literally took until February to basically come to an agreement, and then the final agreement was signed in April. So early in April we signed the contract with the venue, and that was basically the start for us to actually do sponsor agreements, because of course if you don't have a venue agreement and you want to enter agreements with other people, relying on that agreement, you can't. So this caused a serious delay in everything, and we had to basically postpone a lot of things because of that. By December, the refactoring was done, so Patrick basically had... Where's Patrick? There he is. He finished the port to Django 1.8, and we now have the current Django CMS version running on the website as well, which is very good. I think you should deserve a big hand for that. APPLAUSE Right, so we now have a more-done website again. We had to fix a few issues because there were still some things left from the old code, but over the various last few months we sorted out a few things. So in January we started the act of work in the work groups, which was way too late. We should have sorted it much earlier. In March we started the website, then in April the ticket sales, we did the CFP talk voting in May, and the schedule was also late in May. And then now you can see us here during the conference. So it was a really, really hot ride that we had there. It was really a lot of work. We did not have enough volunteers to do everything, which is why several people had to put in a lot of work, especially Christian, who basically was our interface to the venue, because unfortunately the only person at the venue actually speaking English was the secretary of the manager that we had for the venue, which of course did not really help, and also for sourcing all the local shops, like for example getting the water dispensers that was done by Christian. I know this is a huge list. He pretty much matched all the things that we had to do here to get the conference off the ground, and did a huge number of things. So really I think he deserves a hand as well. APPLAUSE Right, and now we're sitting here doing the general assembly. So this is the ticket sales development. I don't know if I can... Is there a mouse somewhere? Yeah, there you go. So in this chart, these are the various conference years. And if you see here, this is 2017, this green chart. And this shows the ticket sales for the conference, and down here these are the social event tickets. And it's not hard to see, but here at the very end... These are the dates from July 7th, so just before the conference. We now have a spark here going up like this. I don't know why. Perhaps people found Remini so nice that they definitely wanted to come along to the social event, or maybe they just didn't know that there was a social event. If you look at the past years, it always seems to happen like that, but this year was particularly strong. We had a very strong spike there. So if you look here, these lines, by the way, are like different special dates, like for example, opening of the CFP, opening of the talk voting. The early bird sales were here. And like I said, it was in the... I think I didn't say it. No, I did not. The early bird sales for 2017 was literally just one day. We got sold out in one day. So this is the spark here. And then we had, with the regular sales, we had a very slow kind of start, and that made us a bit nervous. And then after we had the schedule published, which was around here somewhere, then... or the session list, I think, and the schedule came later, then it started picking up. And as you can see, it ends here, but now, right now, we are basically here again. So kind of the same level again as we had in the previous years. What we found when working on the website, by the way, is that this chart, it has all the ticket sales. So the numbers are not really 100% correct. The ticket sales include day tickets, of which we usually don't sell a lot, but this year, for some reason, we sold quite a few. And it also includes cancelled tickets. So we have this refund policy, so that people can up to, I think, one month before the conference, they can basically get a full refund of everything. And quite a few people do this. So, for example, they buy an early bird ticket and then just wait whether they can actually come and then just ask for a refund just one month before the conference. And this is not included in here. It is included in the number up here, the 1011, that's with the refunded tickets removed. The chart does not show this. So basically, if you compare the various years, we always have more or less the same outcome, because I don't think in the previous years we had fewer refunds. Okay, so what did we do for the organization? Of course, we invited more volunteers to work with us on the organization. We removed many inactive members, members that were still marked as being members of the work groups, but we're actually not doing anything. We basically turned them into inactive. We had to fix a few smaller issues with the website. We found, fortunately, found a few more very active volunteers. So Valeria, where is she? She's not here anymore. She just left. So she was very active and doing a lot of things. Sylvia, I don't think she's here. Don't see her. She helped me with the sponsors. Mario, where's Mario? There you are. He's our water bottle man. So because of him, you have water in your bottles, essentially. I just wanted to help you. This was just at the conference. Before the conference, every time you had a ticket open on the help desk, he was one of the most active ones answering those tickets and dealing with that. I think he did a really excellent job and I think he needs a hand as well. Then we have Manuel Schipper. He could not attend the conference, unfortunately, but hopefully next year he can make it. He helped a lot with the program work group. And then, of course, in communication, right? Several blog posts that we posted were written by him. And then we have Piper. It's like a virtual volunteer. This is something that Alex Savio wrote. It's a bot. The bot was actually very helpful because it kept just going to the help desk, for example, and finding out where the new tickets open and then posted them to the telegram groups, which was a very good integration because you don't then actively have to go to the help desk every time to find out whether something new is there. And that was very good for the sponsors. Piper does the sponsor agreements. So every time we get a new sponsor, then we just say, okay, they give us the details, the billing details, and then Piper goes away and then just does the PDF for the agreement. Unfortunately, Alex Savio could not make it to this conference because he has to learn German. And hopefully maybe next year he can join again. So that's really very unfortunate that he changed jobs and couldn't help us, couldn't continue his very active help until then, that point. These are the most active team members in 2017. So as you can see, not very many people. And this is the reason why it was really a lot of work for most people on this list. Right. Then there's an issue, of course, and I don't want to hide it. This is the Python Italia setup that we had. Originally, we thought because Python Italia had run EuroPython for three years in Florence, very successfully, with lots and lots of help, with lots of enthusiasm, we originally thought when basically working with them again for this year that everything would be more or less the same. And it turned out that something we didn't know was that Python Italia had a huge issue, or has a huge issue with having volunteers or finding volunteers themselves. And so essentially, the only help that we got was Patrick, who worked a lot on the website. And he also, because he's now the chair of Python Italia, he also was very responsive in signing the contracts, of course. And we had Matteo help with the bank transfers and the finances. So basically Matteo was our interface to the financial side of things. But essentially, that was about it for the help from Python Italia. We did have a lot of help from Francesco. He's not here. He's here on site. So when we came to the conference, Francesco started basically just living up to being a really good volunteer. And he helped a lot on site. So essentially, basically our expectations were not fulfilled, and this had a huge burnout effect on the active organizers. So what we did is, to as compromise for this, we basically changed the contract details that we had. Originally, the idea was always to do a 50-50 split between the local organization and the EPS for the profit. And we've now renegotiated that to cap the amount, the profit share of the Python Italia to 10K. And we're both fine with that. And I think we've basically, I think that's a good solution to basically the issue. Of course, this whole thing reminded us that we need to rethink the whole way of how we do conferences. Because what happened this year should never happen again. Because it's simply, if it ever happens again, and we don't have volunteers who are willing to put in 300 to 400 hours into the organization, then your Python won't happen. Simple as that. And so we need to figure out how to, when going forward, how to address this and to make it less of an issue when volunteers break away. And we're going to discuss this in this open space session later on. So we don't have any good, basically, recipe for this of how to do it. We know a couple, we have a couple of ideas of how we can improve things. But it's very difficult to actually communicate. Because on one hand, we don't want to make it look like that. And we need to start differently just to give you some idea of what the issues are. When EuroPython goes to a country, then of course, EuroPython is a large conference. And so you get a lot of attendees there. When that country has a local conference, like a local PyCon, it essentially means that basically EuroPython overrides the local conference. We've seen that with PyCon Italia. When they did EuroPython and then EuroPython moved on to Berlin in that case. What happened for PyCon Italia is that their attendee counts, they dropped by at least 50%, probably even more. I don't remember the exact numbers, but Giovanni told me that it was a significant hit for them. And it was very hard for them to basically reach the same levels again as they had before the conference. And this is one issue. The other issue is that of course, when you have a local team, or you want the local team to actually participate in this, they need to be available. So if you have the local conference and EuroPython be too short after each other, with not enough time for the local team to basically recover and get new energy and so on, then you can basically not rely on the local team anymore. And so that's one of the issues that we have to address. The other issue is that the local teams often don't have the expertise to talk to venues like these, because they usually do the conferences in much smaller venues or even hotels, where it's a lot easier to negotiate these things. With these venues, they really try to make a lot of money, and so you have to be very, very careful when setting everything up. We do know how this works, and so we need to basically do the negotiations directly with the venue, instead of just going via a local team. Anyway, I'm going to talk more about that in the open space session, but this slide already shows a few things that we need to address, so we want to not rely so much or having to rely so much on the on-site teams anymore. We want to set up the whole process of selecting venues using a commercial RFP process. I don't know if you know how that works, so essentially you give them, you send them a spreadsheet with all your questions, and they have to fill it in. You set up a timeline for that. They need to send you contracts, and then basically they are competing for you. The venues would be competing for your Python conference, rather than us saying we want to do the conference at your site, which puts us into a weak position, because they know they are the only conference venue in that location, which can actually do your Python. You normally don't have two in a single location for more than a thousand attendees. This process would make it better for us, because they would compete for us, and we'd also get better prices. Then we also want to move away from this profit sharing with the on-site teams. Instead, what we want to do is, or what we think would be a good approach, would be to issue grants. With grants, I mean not just a few thousand euros, but significant grants, like 10K, 20K, depending on how well everything worked out. These are some of the ideas that we have. Nothing is set in stone yet. We need to discuss. We think that we want to get into contact with local teams. That's basically meant for later on in this open space. We are already discussing with people in the Czech Republic, so we're currently looking at Prague as one candidate. The other candidate is Edinburgh in Scotland. We don't have a group there yet, but we know a couple of people really well, which we can ask and which could provide support for us there. Of course, we're going to do the RFP with more venues than just these, also to get a better view of what's available and what we can do. We probably have to decide based on the venue quality and the cost that we have, and then talk to the local team to make everything, to work out everything, and to make sure that we don't overwrite their local conference and that we don't get in the way because we want to work together with the local team. The whole point of the EPS is to help the community not to work against it. We still have this issue with the domains, with the European Press.org domain, but we've not done anything. We have a European Press TV domain, which basically goes to the YouTube channel. We use European Press in IO for systems, European Press in EU for the website. We have the trademark, of course. We tried for this conference to create a new logo. The process didn't really work out that well. We tried 99 designs to get a new design. It didn't really help. Then we basically hired the designer from last year again to update the logo, and we came up with this logo, which is inspired by the sea and the umbrellas that you have here on the beach. It looks nice. I think everybody likes it, and this worked well. Then for the EPS organization, last year, if you remember, we discussed moving the EPS out of Sweden into some other place where we have more control, especially because at that time we did not have any access to our own bank accounts. Fortunately, Anders Hammerquist volunteered to help us with this. He works at OpenEnd, the organization where we have our registered address. That's very helpful. He can get all the paperwork for us. He is very well connected locally to accountants and to banks. What he did is he essentially set up new bank accounts for us at the SEB. Before that, we were at Sweatbank. We closed that account, or those accounts we had to. We now have two new accounts for euros and for SEK at the SEB. Setting this up was very easy because he personally knows people at the SEB branch. This made things a lot easier. He also helped us get the VAT ID. This was a bit of a mess before because we already had tried to get a VAT ID before, and they basically declined us giving us one. Usually if they declined once, it's hard to then actually get one afterwards. But he managed to do that. We now have a VAT ID which makes it possible for us to, for example, invoice the sponsors directly. That's what we've also done for Europehison 2017. All the sponsor money goes directly to the EPS. This is very good news. Essentially what we did at that point was we postponed this moving to a different country. What we still have to figure out is whether we can, by using that VAT ID that we have, we can get VAT back from other EU countries. We had an accountant. She told us that it's not possible to do this because the EPS is a non-profit. We have a new accountant, and they are more experienced in EU VAT issues, and perhaps we can figure out a way to make that work because it would enable us to actually then enter contracts with the venues directly, rather than going through the local organization. VAT in general is a huge issue. It looks easy to handle between companies, but because of the EU regulations for conferences, the regulation going like this, when you do a conference in a certain location, you have to pay the VAT in the country of that location. EPS being in Sweden, in this case, Europehison being in Italy, it means that we have to pay taxes in Italy. In order to pay taxes in a country, you have to have a local tax representative for that. We would have to hire, now we have Python and Italia doing this, which makes things easier, but normally we would have to then hire a local tax representative doing all the tax reporting, and then we would have to get the taxes back again from Italy, basically against all the expenses that we have and so on. And then because we don't know whether we can get VAT back in Sweden for expenses that we have in other countries, we basically decided to go with a local organisation, do everything via that, and then basically not have this issue. So what we did in order to make that happen is we gave 40k to Python and Italia at a 0% loan, basically in order to handle all the initial payments for the contract here. All the direct contacts were done by Python and Italia, so they basically sign up for the venue. And so going forward, unless we get this whole thing with the EUVAT sorted, we have to continue doing this to make things easier. So right now, Python and Italia is doing the ticketing, doing the local sourcing of things that we need, and we basically get all the sponsorship money directly into the EPS. And then later on, when we basically then decide on how things should work out, how the budget should be, split the profit and so on, we have to then do one transfer at the very end between the two organisations to even out everything. Okay, so I already talked about this. EPS wants to become something like a European Python Software Foundation, so we want to help the community. In short term, we funded PyConDE 2016, we funded Django Girls' EuroPython with around 7000 euros, and we had this ticket discount coupon activity that we basically sent out emails to user groups in Europe to give them easier access to the EuroPython conference. Right, and I'm getting a bit tired, so now's the time for the Treasurer report. Yes, current assets in the bank account. Right, Anders sent the details, where's my mouse? There it is. He sent the details just a few minutes ago. So let me see whether I can find them. This is going to be interesting. Okay, so I can't see what you're seeing, so... Let's just say I showed this, right? Like I said, we gave around 40k to Python Italia, so before we had the payments from the sponsors coming in, we essentially... Well, we didn't have anything much left in the bank accounts, so I think maybe it should be something like 10k or so. I don't know whether it shows up here somewhere. That is a good question. It could be at SEC, unless it says somewhere. It says EU up there, now that's EU. That's just where sales are. Okay, I'm going to report this afterwards when I have actually had time to look at this. Anyway, we have enough money, we have at least 40k, because we're going to get that back. We're going to get the extra money from 2016 in the next few months, and then we're going to finish this conference, probably with the profit as well. I don't know exactly yet how big that profit will be, but it's going to be a profit of at least 10k, I think, probably more like in the area of 30k. So, yeah, 30k, like what we had in the last year. We have two bank accounts, SEC for Swedish Kronos. We need that account because all the local tax payments go in SEC. Plus, if we want to send money elsewhere, we have to like, for example, USD, we have to use that account, and we have a Euro account for everything else. Then we have PayPal, it's connected to the SEC account, and we have a credit card now. All thanks to Anders. Anders is watching this on video, so maybe we can give him a big hand for helping us. Now it's time for the auditor report. Auditor this year was Stefan. Stefan, do you have anything to say? I discussed with Anders and with Marc about the accounting, and in fact, we have no issues with the accounting. We wait for some advice, for some payments, but everything is okay for me, I checked the incoming invoice and the how-going for the sponsoring and accepted for the conversion from dollars to Euro. Everything is okay. So, just that. We have to put that in the notes as well. So, the next point on the agenda is discharge from liability for the 2016-2017 board. So, we need to vote now. So, do we discharge the board from liability last year's work? Everybody who is in favor, please raise your hand. I think the board should abstain, right? Abstain? No, abstain? No. So, 16 in favor? Zero abstains? No. Okay, thank you very much. Then we have candidates for the board 2017-2018. As you can see, a couple of board members did not run again for board. So, we have Christian, we have Daria, we have a new candidate, it's Jill. Jill, maybe you can say a few things about yourself. First welcome, Jill. Hello, I'm Jill and I like Python and I like hopping out here. That's really it. I've probably seen Jill run around the conference venue all the time. He's chair of the support work group, so he has a lot to do there. Then we have Anders. Anders is not here, unfortunately. Anders would like to run for board as well. And he manages basically the financial side of things. And he would then, if he's elected for board, he would then become the treasurer of the EPS. Alexander, you know, myself and Alex Savio, he cannot be here. But he still wants to help on the board and he has lots of institutional knowledge and contacts. So, the existing board thinks that this new board is actually a very good board. So, now let's vote for the individual members. We're going to do individual votes. What we are going to do is we're going to vote for each one, the positive votes, abstains and no votes. And then someone gets on the board if they have more yes votes than no votes. That's how it works. So, now we first vote for Christian. Christian Barra, so who's in favour for Christian Barra being board? Yes, you're yes. Christian, you're undecided yes? You're yes as well. So, let's say 16 in favour, just double checking. Any abstain, non-favour, okay, 16 votes for Christian. No, yeah, no zero. Of course, you can vote for yourself. Everybody can vote for themselves. Yeah, sure you can vote for yourselves. Yeah, you can push not to vote. Okay, so the next is Daria. So, who's in favour for Daria staying and being a board member for this year? Abstain? Who's not, who says no? So, basically, yeah, it's also like, you also voting for yourself? Okay, then we have 16, yeah. Just like keep it simple. 16, I think. Yeah, 16. All right, next for Jill, Jill Bertol, concavs. So, who's in favour of Jill? And I said 16. Stefan, yourself, yeah. So, 16 yes, just like for the record, abstain? No, okay, 16 in favour. And then for Anders, how about a quiz, in favour? Yeah, so, it's 16 in favour, abstain? No, okay, zero, no. Then I would like to ask Daria to do the next vote candidate, because I cannot be leading the session and more like chairing. Who's in favour of... to voting for the Alexander Hendorf in the board this next year? Plus one, we have 17. Okay, let's continue with Mark Andre Lambert, chair, who's in favour. So, that's 17, yes, abstain? No. Okay, then Alexander Savio, who's in favour. Like, 17 in favour, abstain? No, yeah, zero, zero, 17 in favour. Okay, then we need to elect a chair of the board. I basically nominated myself again, which, I mean, no one wants to do this, so... Who's in favour of Mark Andre's, they are well-beloved chair. So, I see 17 in favour, just like abstain? No, so 17 in favour, zero, zero. Then we have something new this year. This is kind of like a bit of a last-minute thing. We wanted to add a new position to the EPS, vice chair position, because the bylaws currently only have a chair position, and because the chair is rather important for the EPS, because the chair has to essentially sign the contracts, if the chair breaks away, then basically the EPS becomes, well, dysfunctional, so it cannot operate anymore. And what we think is it would be a good idea to have a vice chair position, so that the vice chair can then basically fulfil the chair positions, in case the chair has to step down, or just... It's not available anymore. So, it says, please vote here, you haven't seen the changes. These are the changes. So you can just... I can just read them. So one change is that we have, on the agenda for the General Assembly, we're going to add election of the vice chair person of the board, and then position 13, it now says the board consists of a chair person, the vice chair person, and two to seven board members. Previously, we had just a chair person and two to eight board members. The chair not being counted in this case as board member. And in this case, in case the chair person steps down during the election term, the vice chair person shall replace the chair person for the remainder of the term. In case the vice chair person steps down as well, the board may elect an intermediate chair for the remaining of the term, or call in a General Assembly to vote in a new board. So this is what we'd... The old board would like to suggest as change. We need to vote on this. Does anyone have any issues with this? I mean, just maybe all questions before we vote. Okay, let's vote. Who's in favor for this bylaws change? Yeah, 17 in favor. Abstain. No. So this being effective now, we need to vote on a vice chair. And Alexander nominated himself, or I pushed him to. Who is in favor of Alexander Fender for the co-chair? 17. Who is abstain? No. 17. Okay, next thing. So we need again an auditor for the bank accounts, and we need one replacement against the auditor becomes unavailable to do the actual auditing. Any volunteers for this? Okay, so who's in favor that Stefan... Who's in favor of Stefan? It's the auditor for the European Society. It's just for one year, so... So 17. Yes, abstain. Nobody against, also nobody. And we need a replacement or basically a backup. Yes, and I think... Yeah, we need one more replacement auditor. We need a volunteer because Raul was doing it before, it's not here, unfortunately. And actually it's an easy job. Actually, I started as an auditor in Berlin. So it's an easy thing. So it's the auditor... We need to speed up a bit. Yeah, it's an auditor, it must be an auditor member. No. No? Okay, then Mario volunteered to be an auditor. So who's in favor of Mario Teal to become the replacement auditor or like backup auditor? Okay, I see 17 in favor. Abstain. No. Okay, just to double check because you raised your hand. Are your EPS members? Are you already EPS members? Could I just ask what's the next session after this one? Yeah, just like check. Okay, so 17 yes and 0 abstains and 0 noes. Coffee break. Coffee break, okay. So can we overrun a bit? Yeah, it's a 3.45. Okay, so let's just speed up a bit and then... So that we managed this. So the next thing is optional election of a nomination committee. The idea being that we have a committee that basically then checks all the nominations and proposes them to for the next election. We've so far never needed this. We don't think we're going to. So the board thinks that this is not needed, but it's really up to you. I mean, if you think this is needed, then please pick up. Otherwise we can vote on not having it. So who's... Who's in favour that we set... Let's say who's okay that there's no election committee... nomination committee for as proposed by the board. Okay, that's 17 yes. Obstain, no. Thank you. Okay, we're almost done. So budget presentation. So basically this is what we did with the money that we had. Like I said, we funded a few smaller events. We also started buying for this conference. We started buying goods that we want to keep as EPS. Those will be EPS owned. So we bought power strips quite a lot, 150 or 140 of those. We bought the roll up displays that you see around here, the schedule banner, the large one outside. Those were all bought in a way that you can reuse them in future years. So we're going to put everything into storage box here in Rimini, and then when we have the location for the next conference, we're just going to ship everything over there. We bought the TVs, we bought routers, we bought EPS for the wireless backup EPS using mobile SIM cards. We rented the storage box for everything, and we have regular expense, which is the only regular expense that we have. It's the web server. It's about 100 euros per month. And everything else that we did was basically handled by Mateo from Python Italia with the help of Christian. Because Christian Lennett has credit card because Python Italia doesn't have one. And for buying an Amazon unique one, so he helped a lot there. So this is basically the budget presentation that we have. I could also show you the budget, but we don't have time for that now, unfortunately. I can show you later on if you want to, or you can just come to me. So we need to vote on accepting the budget, and we need to vote on the decision on the membership fees. So far the membership fees have always been, not always actually, they were one euro in the early days, but no one actually collected the euro. And then at some point we set it to zero, which is more realistic. Right. It's like two votes now? Yeah, it's two votes, yes. So who's in favor that we accept the budget as proposed? And see. Abstain. Okay, that's one abstain. Who's against the budget? Who does this as well? How do you think that we would consider five euros in the end? No, no, no, we're on the budget. We're on the slide before. We're on the budget vote. Okay. So, okay, then again, who's in favor that this budget is fine for our financial plan? It's just a planning thing, actually. So, we're on the budget vote, and we're on the budget vote. So, what's the budget? We're on the budget. Okay, then again, who's in favor that we accept the budget? So, what's the budget? Yeah, I think. I think. No, I think. No, the thing is, I mean, we only have like 180 members, or do you know? 180 to. And basically collecting the money, five euros, which I think would be a fair amount, but we also would have like a lot of administration stuff, and we would carry. And we would have to do that, and, you know, like getting people's bank accounts and stuff. So, I don't think I don't think we really make any money from it worth the effort. That's why. Okay, any more comments? Ideas? Raise it to 1,000 euros now. Because then the administration is over. So, okay. That would be a realistic amount too. Who's in favor that we, the membership fee stays at zero euros for next year? I think that's the farm, like 17. Obstains? No, like 17 in favor. No, things. Okay. Forget the please vote here because we have not received any motions from the members. So, we can skip this. And we're done. So, if you have any questions, please ask now. Or if it's something specific to 2018, then please come to the open space session. Otherwise, I'd say thank you. Thank you.
 to the  public.  This is the official part of the EPS. To be honest, it's a  bit boring, but nothing much we can do. We have this agenda in  the bylaws, and so we need to do it this way.  Do we have the EPS members all sitting here?  We have a lot of people who are not here.  We have a lot of people who are not here.  If the voting EPS members please sit in the first few rows so  that it's easier for us to basically do the voting.  And then, of course, everyone else is welcome to join. We don't  have anything to hide. And if you find this interesting, then  you can sign up to become an EPS member afterwards, of  course.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Unfortunately, we have a number of people who are not here at  the conference.  So, I'm going to try to use Skype to basically join them here.  Okay.  He's not answering.  So, let's just go ahead.  Okay.  So, first of all, welcome to all the new EPS members that we  have. We signed up a couple of more EPS members in recent weeks.  We now have 182 members.  We have a number of EPS members. We have a number of EPS members  in recent weeks.  Okay.  So, we have a number of EPS members.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  Okay.  that we have and we need then two checkers of the minutes.  So basically, okay, Stefan will do the minutes  and then we need two checkers.  Basically say that, okay, these minutes are correct.  Daria and Wells Christian.  So the first task for Stefan would be to now note  the names of the two checkers, the secretary and himself.  Do you need a piece of paper?  And normally the chairperson of the meeting also does the voting.  So Alexander, the first thing that you have to do is you have to establish,  we have to have an emotion establishing the timeliness of the call  of the General Assembly and then we need to vote on that.  So just to maybe as reminder or introduction to how this works,  timeliness of the call, the bylaws say that we have to call  for the General Assembly 14 days before the actual General Assembly  and up to five days before the General Assembly,  we can make changes to the agenda and the suggestions from the board  or board candidates.  Sorry, was it the secretary?  Yes, that's fine.  I'm not prepared, I did too much party work.  I'm sorry.  It was, yeah, so we had a timely, is anybody saying  that you did not call for this meeting in time?  No, so I can say the meeting was called timely.  Wait, abstentions.  Oh, okay, we have to do all the voting, sorry.  It's the usual kind of process.  Anyone against?  Abstain, anyone?  Who's saying everything was in time?  Lost in time, yes.  Like abstains?  So we have like your thing?  Huh?  You're not, like you say yes.  Yeah, okay, that's true.  Stefan, what you also need is we need a list of all the EPS members  who have attended the General Assembly.  So please pass around a piece of paper.  15 people in the meeting here, right?  No, 16, sorry.  Okay, so I think we managed that part.  So let's go to the next one.  As far as I see, everybody said yes.  Is it abstain?  No, just like for double checking.  No, 16, yes.  Okay, so the next thing is the annual report by the board.  So this is what I'm going to do.  I'm going to show you the preliminary results from 2016,  the actual 27 timeline, not the one that I just showed  in the previous talk, and then how we're going to move on.  So these are the preliminary results from 2016.  Preliminary because we don't have the complete,  we've not gone through the complete balance sheet  with the local organization, the ACPYSS in from Bilbao yet.  But this is what they reported to us.  So the conference made a profit of 71,481.55 euros.  This currently includes 17,920 euros pending sponsor payments.  So they are still having issues getting all the sponsors  to actually pay.  We've done a round of emails, so we managed to get a few  of them to pay, but this amount is still basically blocked.  If we do get all the sponsor payments, of course,  the EPS share will be 50%, and then we'll get 35,740  and 77 cents from the ACPYSS, and that will go  towards the EPS budget that we have.  If you compare that to the previous years,  it's a little lower than 2016, and the reason being  that for 2017, we basically spent a bit more money  on nice things like, for example, the booths  that we had in Bilbao.  This was actually a good investment because we had lots  of sponsors who really liked those booths,  and they signed up again for this year,  so it made a lot of sense to do this investment.  Yes?  Sorry?  Why did you add that?  Ah, sorry, yes, yes, yes.  You're right, 2015.  Let me just fix that.  OK, I can fix it later.  There you go.  Compared to 2014, it's a much better result,  and as you can see, we're actually getting some money  into basically work on the mission, the new mission  that we have that we want to support other organizations  in Europe.  Right now, we're still the, OK, what we have in the bank  right now is what we had in the bank because we gave a loan  to the local organization for this year.  We had in the bank about 46,000, and 40,000 we basically  gave a loan to the Python Italia organization  so that they can basically finance  the initial contract payments that we had to do for this venue.  So let's have a look at the actual timeline of 2017.  So in last year in July, we had the election of the new board,  and August to October, we did the selection process.  The selection process took longer than expected  because we had a few issues with the venues  that we originally had chosen or looked at.  Let's put it that way.  So originally, the idea was to do it in Como or do it in Milano.  This didn't work out because the costs were literally  twice as much as what we pay here,  and so it wouldn't have been sustainable.  So we couldn't do it, so we had to go and then find new locations  and Christian then identified some more.  It was I think Genoa, Ricione and Rimini, and another one,  I think those three.  And then eventually, we then decided to go with Rimini.  We had another candidate, which was Brno in the Czech Republic,  but the problem there was that the venue did not really,  I mean, the venue was a nice venue and it had enough rooms,  but there was no room that was available  for doing large plenary sessions.  So they had a room which was very, very long,  and so the people in the back wouldn't have been able  to see the screen in the front, and so that was a pity.  So this is always important when you go to, when you select venues,  that you always have to make sure that everything is actually  suited for a conference of this size.  Anyway, so we decided on Rimini, and then we started the whole process  of basically getting everything going with the contract and so on.  We launched the preview website early on,  but we did not put any dates on it,  and the reason was that we had of course not signed the contract yet.  We started the negotiations with the venue in November,  and it literally took until February to basically come to an agreement,  and then the final agreement was signed in April.  So early in April we signed the contract with the venue,  and that was basically the start for us to actually do sponsor agreements,  because of course if you don't have a venue agreement  and you want to enter agreements with other people,  relying on that agreement, you can't.  So this caused a serious delay in everything,  and we had to basically postpone a lot of things because of that.  By December, the refactoring was done,  so Patrick basically had... Where's Patrick?  There he is.  He finished the port to Django 1.8,  and we now have the current Django CMS version running on the website as well,  which is very good.  I think you should deserve a big hand for that.  APPLAUSE  Right, so we now have a more-done website again.  We had to fix a few issues because there were still some things left from the old code,  but over the various last few months we sorted out a few things.  So in January we started the act of work in the work groups,  which was way too late.  We should have sorted it much earlier.  In March we started the website, then in April the ticket sales,  we did the CFP talk voting in May, and the schedule was also late in May.  And then now you can see us here during the conference.  So it was a really, really hot ride that we had there.  It was really a lot of work.  We did not have enough volunteers to do everything,  which is why several people had to put in a lot of work,  especially Christian, who basically was our interface to the venue,  because unfortunately the only person at the venue actually speaking English  was the secretary of the manager that we had for the venue,  which of course did not really help,  and also for sourcing all the local shops,  like for example getting the water dispensers that was done by Christian.  I know this is a huge list.  He pretty much matched all the things that we had to do here  to get the conference off the ground, and did a huge number of things.  So really I think he deserves a hand as well.  APPLAUSE  Right, and now we're sitting here doing the general assembly.  So this is the ticket sales development.  I don't know if I can...  Is there a mouse somewhere?  Yeah, there you go.  So in this chart, these are the various conference years.  And if you see here, this is 2017, this green chart.  And this shows the ticket sales for the conference,  and down here these are the social event tickets.  And it's not hard to see, but here at the very end...  These are the dates from July 7th, so just before the conference.  We now have a spark here going up like this.  I don't know why.  Perhaps people found Remini so nice that they definitely wanted to come along to the social event,  or maybe they just didn't know that there was a social event.  If you look at the past years, it always seems to happen like that,  but this year was particularly strong.  We had a very strong spike there.  So if you look here, these lines, by the way, are like different special dates,  like for example, opening of the CFP, opening of the talk voting.  The early bird sales were here.  And like I said, it was in the... I think I didn't say it.  No, I did not.  The early bird sales for 2017 was literally just one day.  We got sold out in one day.  So this is the spark here.  And then we had, with the regular sales, we had a very slow kind of start,  and that made us a bit nervous.  And then after we had the schedule published, which was around here somewhere,  then... or the session list, I think, and the schedule came later,  then it started picking up.  And as you can see, it ends here,  but now, right now, we are basically here again.  So kind of the same level again as we had in the previous years.  What we found when working on the website, by the way,  is that this chart, it has all the ticket sales.  So the numbers are not really 100% correct.  The ticket sales include day tickets, of which we usually don't sell a lot,  but this year, for some reason, we sold quite a few.  And it also includes cancelled tickets.  So we have this refund policy, so that people can up to, I think,  one month before the conference, they can basically get a full refund of everything.  And quite a few people do this.  So, for example, they buy an early bird ticket and then just wait  whether they can actually come and then just ask for a refund just one month  before the conference.  And this is not included in here.  It is included in the number up here, the 1011,  that's with the refunded tickets removed.  The chart does not show this.  So basically, if you compare the various years,  we always have more or less the same outcome,  because I don't think in the previous years we had fewer refunds.  Okay, so what did we do for the organization?  Of course, we invited more volunteers to work with us on the organization.  We removed many inactive members,  members that were still marked as being members of the work groups,  but we're actually not doing anything.  We basically turned them into inactive.  We had to fix a few smaller issues with the website.  We found, fortunately, found a few more very active volunteers.  So Valeria, where is she?  She's not here anymore. She just left.  So she was very active and doing a lot of things.  Sylvia, I don't think she's here.  Don't see her. She helped me with the sponsors.  Mario, where's Mario?  There you are.  He's our water bottle man.  So because of him, you have water in your bottles, essentially.  I just wanted to help you.  This was just at the conference.  Before the conference, every time you had a ticket open on the help desk,  he was one of the most active ones answering those tickets and dealing with that.  I think he did a really excellent job and I think he needs a hand as well.  Then we have Manuel Schipper.  He could not attend the conference, unfortunately,  but hopefully next year he can make it.  He helped a lot with the program work group.  And then, of course, in communication, right?  Several blog posts that we posted were written by him.  And then we have Piper.  It's like a virtual volunteer.  This is something that Alex Savio wrote.  It's a bot.  The bot was actually very helpful because it kept just going to the help desk, for example,  and finding out where the new tickets open and then posted them to the telegram groups,  which was a very good integration because you don't then actively have to go to the help desk  every time to find out whether something new is there.  And that was very good for the sponsors.  Piper does the sponsor agreements.  So every time we get a new sponsor, then we just say, okay, they give us the details,  the billing details, and then Piper goes away and then just does the PDF for the agreement.  Unfortunately, Alex Savio could not make it to this conference because he has to learn German.  And hopefully maybe next year he can join again.  So that's really very unfortunate that he changed jobs and couldn't help us,  couldn't continue his very active help until then, that point.  These are the most active team members in 2017.  So as you can see, not very many people.  And this is the reason why it was really a lot of work for most people on this list.  Right. Then there's an issue, of course, and I don't want to hide it.  This is the Python Italia setup that we had.  Originally, we thought because Python Italia had run EuroPython for three years in Florence,  very successfully, with lots and lots of help, with lots of enthusiasm,  we originally thought when basically working with them again for this year that everything would be more or less the same.  And it turned out that something we didn't know was that Python Italia had a huge issue,  or has a huge issue with having volunteers or finding volunteers themselves.  And so essentially, the only help that we got was Patrick, who worked a lot on the website.  And he also, because he's now the chair of Python Italia,  he also was very responsive in signing the contracts, of course.  And we had Matteo help with the bank transfers and the finances.  So basically Matteo was our interface to the financial side of things.  But essentially, that was about it for the help from Python Italia.  We did have a lot of help from Francesco.  He's not here.  He's here on site.  So when we came to the conference, Francesco started basically just living up to being a really good volunteer.  And he helped a lot on site.  So essentially, basically our expectations were not fulfilled,  and this had a huge burnout effect on the active organizers.  So what we did is, to as compromise for this, we basically changed the contract details that we had.  Originally, the idea was always to do a 50-50 split between the local organization and the EPS for the profit.  And we've now renegotiated that to cap the amount, the profit share of the Python Italia to 10K.  And we're both fine with that.  And I think we've basically, I think that's a good solution to basically the issue.  Of course, this whole thing reminded us that we need to rethink the whole way of how we do conferences.  Because what happened this year should never happen again.  Because it's simply, if it ever happens again, and we don't have volunteers who are willing to put in 300 to 400 hours into the organization,  then your Python won't happen.  Simple as that.  And so we need to figure out how to, when going forward, how to address this and to make it less of an issue when volunteers break away.  And we're going to discuss this in this open space session later on.  So we don't have any good, basically, recipe for this of how to do it.  We know a couple, we have a couple of ideas of how we can improve things.  But it's very difficult to actually communicate.  Because on one hand, we don't want to make it look like that.  And we need to start differently just to give you some idea of what the issues are.  When EuroPython goes to a country, then of course, EuroPython is a large conference.  And so you get a lot of attendees there.  When that country has a local conference, like a local PyCon,  it essentially means that basically EuroPython overrides the local conference.  We've seen that with PyCon Italia.  When they did EuroPython and then EuroPython moved on to Berlin in that case.  What happened for PyCon Italia is that their attendee counts, they dropped by at least 50%, probably even more.  I don't remember the exact numbers, but Giovanni told me that it was a significant hit for them.  And it was very hard for them to basically reach the same levels again as they had before the conference.  And this is one issue.  The other issue is that of course, when you have a local team,  or you want the local team to actually participate in this, they need to be available.  So if you have the local conference and EuroPython be too short after each other,  with not enough time for the local team to basically recover and get new energy and so on,  then you can basically not rely on the local team anymore.  And so that's one of the issues that we have to address.  The other issue is that the local teams often don't have the expertise to talk to venues like these,  because they usually do the conferences in much smaller venues or even hotels,  where it's a lot easier to negotiate these things.  With these venues, they really try to make a lot of money,  and so you have to be very, very careful when setting everything up.  We do know how this works, and so we need to basically do the negotiations directly with the venue,  instead of just going via a local team.  Anyway, I'm going to talk more about that in the open space session,  but this slide already shows a few things that we need to address,  so we want to not rely so much or having to rely so much on the on-site teams anymore.  We want to set up the whole process of selecting venues using a commercial RFP process.  I don't know if you know how that works, so essentially you give them,  you send them a spreadsheet with all your questions, and they have to fill it in.  You set up a timeline for that.  They need to send you contracts, and then basically they are competing for you.  The venues would be competing for your Python conference,  rather than us saying we want to do the conference at your site,  which puts us into a weak position, because they know they are the only conference venue in that location,  which can actually do your Python. You normally don't have two in a single location for more than a thousand attendees.  This process would make it better for us, because they would compete for us,  and we'd also get better prices.  Then we also want to move away from this profit sharing with the on-site teams.  Instead, what we want to do is, or what we think would be a good approach,  would be to issue grants.  With grants, I mean not just a few thousand euros, but significant grants,  like 10K, 20K, depending on how well everything worked out.  These are some of the ideas that we have.  Nothing is set in stone yet. We need to discuss.  We think that we want to get into contact with local teams.  That's basically meant for later on in this open space.  We are already discussing with people in the Czech Republic,  so we're currently looking at Prague as one candidate.  The other candidate is Edinburgh in Scotland.  We don't have a group there yet, but we know a couple of people really well,  which we can ask and which could provide support for us there.  Of course, we're going to do the RFP with more venues than just these,  also to get a better view of what's available and what we can do.  We probably have to decide based on the venue quality and the cost that we have,  and then talk to the local team to make everything, to work out everything,  and to make sure that we don't overwrite their local conference  and that we don't get in the way because we want to work together with the local team.  The whole point of the EPS is to help the community not to work against it.  We still have this issue with the domains, with the European Press.org domain,  but we've not done anything.  We have a European Press TV domain, which basically goes to the YouTube channel.  We use European Press in IO for systems, European Press in EU for the website.  We have the trademark, of course.  We tried for this conference to create a new logo.  The process didn't really work out that well.  We tried 99 designs to get a new design.  It didn't really help.  Then we basically hired the designer from last year again to update the logo,  and we came up with this logo, which is inspired by the sea  and the umbrellas that you have here on the beach.  It looks nice.  I think everybody likes it, and this worked well.  Then for the EPS organization,  last year, if you remember, we discussed moving the EPS out of Sweden  into some other place where we have more control,  especially because at that time we did not have any access to our own bank accounts.  Fortunately, Anders Hammerquist volunteered to help us with this.  He works at OpenEnd, the organization where we have our registered address.  That's very helpful.  He can get all the paperwork for us.  He is very well connected locally to accountants and to banks.  What he did is he essentially set up new bank accounts for us at the SEB.  Before that, we were at Sweatbank.  We closed that account, or those accounts we had to.  We now have two new accounts for euros and for SEK at the SEB.  Setting this up was very easy because he personally knows people at the SEB branch.  This made things a lot easier.  He also helped us get the VAT ID.  This was a bit of a mess before because we already had tried to get a VAT ID before,  and they basically declined us giving us one.  Usually if they declined once, it's hard to then actually get one afterwards.  But he managed to do that.  We now have a VAT ID which makes it possible for us to, for example,  invoice the sponsors directly.  That's what we've also done for Europehison 2017.  All the sponsor money goes directly to the EPS.  This is very good news.  Essentially what we did at that point was we postponed this moving to a different country.  What we still have to figure out is whether we can, by using that VAT ID that we have,  we can get VAT back from other EU countries.  We had an accountant.  She told us that it's not possible to do this because the EPS is a non-profit.  We have a new accountant, and they are more experienced in EU VAT issues,  and perhaps we can figure out a way to make that work because it would enable us to actually then enter contracts with the venues directly,  rather than going through the local organization.  VAT in general is a huge issue.  It looks easy to handle between companies,  but because of the EU regulations for conferences,  the regulation going like this, when you do a conference in a certain location,  you have to pay the VAT in the country of that location.  EPS being in Sweden, in this case, Europehison being in Italy,  it means that we have to pay taxes in Italy.  In order to pay taxes in a country, you have to have a local tax representative for that.  We would have to hire, now we have Python and Italia doing this,  which makes things easier, but normally we would have to then hire a local tax representative  doing all the tax reporting, and then we would have to get the taxes back again from Italy,  basically against all the expenses that we have and so on.  And then because we don't know whether we can get VAT back in Sweden for expenses that we have in other countries,  we basically decided to go with a local organisation, do everything via that,  and then basically not have this issue.  So what we did in order to make that happen is we gave 40k to Python and Italia at a 0% loan,  basically in order to handle all the initial payments for the contract here.  All the direct contacts were done by Python and Italia, so they basically sign up for the venue.  And so going forward, unless we get this whole thing with the EUVAT sorted,  we have to continue doing this to make things easier.  So right now, Python and Italia is doing the ticketing, doing the local sourcing of things that we need,  and we basically get all the sponsorship money directly into the EPS.  And then later on, when we basically then decide on how things should work out,  how the budget should be, split the profit and so on,  we have to then do one transfer at the very end between the two organisations to even out everything.  Okay, so I already talked about this.  EPS wants to become something like a European Python Software Foundation,  so we want to help the community.  In short term, we funded PyConDE 2016, we funded Django Girls' EuroPython with around 7000 euros,  and we had this ticket discount coupon activity that we basically sent out emails to user groups in Europe  to give them easier access to the EuroPython conference.  Right, and I'm getting a bit tired, so now's the time for the Treasurer report.  Yes, current assets in the bank account.  Right, Anders sent the details, where's my mouse?  There it is.  He sent the details just a few minutes ago.  So let me see whether I can find them.  This is going to be interesting.  Okay, so I can't see what you're seeing, so...  Let's just say I showed this, right?  Like I said, we gave around 40k to Python Italia, so before we had the payments from the sponsors coming in,  we essentially...  Well, we didn't have anything much left in the bank accounts, so I think maybe it should be something like 10k or so.  I don't know whether it shows up here somewhere.  That is a good question.  It could be at SEC, unless it says somewhere.  It says EU up there, now that's EU.  That's just where sales are.  Okay, I'm going to report this afterwards when I have actually had time to look at this.  Anyway, we have enough money, we have at least 40k, because we're going to get that back.  We're going to get the extra money from 2016 in the next few months,  and then we're going to finish this conference, probably with the profit as well.  I don't know exactly yet how big that profit will be,  but it's going to be a profit of at least 10k, I think, probably more like in the area of 30k.  So, yeah, 30k, like what we had in the last year.  We have two bank accounts, SEC for Swedish Kronos.  We need that account because all the local tax payments go in SEC.  Plus, if we want to send money elsewhere, we have to like, for example, USD, we have to use that account,  and we have a Euro account for everything else.  Then we have PayPal, it's connected to the SEC account, and we have a credit card now.  All thanks to Anders.  Anders is watching this on video, so maybe we can give him a big hand for helping us.  Now it's time for the auditor report.  Auditor this year was Stefan.  Stefan, do you have anything to say?  I discussed with Anders and with Marc about the accounting,  and in fact, we have no issues with the accounting.  We wait for some advice, for some payments, but everything is okay for me,  I checked the incoming invoice and the how-going for the sponsoring and accepted for the conversion from dollars to Euro.  Everything is okay.  So, just that.  We have to put that in the notes as well.  So, the next point on the agenda is discharge from liability for the 2016-2017 board.  So, we need to vote now.  So, do we discharge the board from liability last year's work?  Everybody who is in favor, please raise your hand.  I think the board should abstain, right?  Abstain?  No, abstain?  No.  So, 16 in favor?  Zero abstains?  No.  Okay, thank you very much.  Then we have candidates for the board 2017-2018.  As you can see, a couple of board members did not run again for board.  So, we have Christian, we have Daria, we have a new candidate, it's Jill.  Jill, maybe you can say a few things about yourself.  First welcome, Jill.  Hello, I'm Jill and I like Python and I like hopping out here.  That's really it.  I've probably seen Jill run around the conference venue all the time.  He's chair of the support work group, so he has a lot to do there.  Then we have Anders.  Anders is not here, unfortunately.  Anders would like to run for board as well.  And he manages basically the financial side of things.  And he would then, if he's elected for board, he would then become the treasurer of the EPS.  Alexander, you know, myself and Alex Savio, he cannot be here.  But he still wants to help on the board and he has lots of institutional knowledge and contacts.  So, the existing board thinks that this new board is actually a very good board.  So, now let's vote for the individual members.  We're going to do individual votes.  What we are going to do is we're going to vote for each one, the positive votes, abstains and no votes.  And then someone gets on the board if they have more yes votes than no votes.  That's how it works.  So, now we first vote for Christian.  Christian Barra, so who's in favour for Christian Barra being board?  Yes, you're yes.  Christian, you're undecided yes?  You're yes as well.  So, let's say 16 in favour, just double checking.  Any abstain, non-favour, okay, 16 votes for Christian.  No, yeah, no zero.  Of course, you can vote for yourself.  Everybody can vote for themselves.  Yeah, sure you can vote for yourselves.  Yeah, you can push not to vote.  Okay, so the next is Daria.  So, who's in favour for Daria staying and being a board member for this year?  Abstain?  Who's not, who says no?  So, basically, yeah, it's also like, you also voting for yourself?  Okay, then we have 16, yeah.  Just like keep it simple.  16, I think.  Yeah, 16.  All right, next for Jill, Jill Bertol, concavs.  So, who's in favour of Jill?  And I said 16.  Stefan, yourself, yeah.  So, 16 yes, just like for the record, abstain?  No, okay, 16 in favour.  And then for Anders, how about a quiz, in favour?  Yeah, so, it's 16 in favour, abstain?  No, okay, zero, no.  Then I would like to ask Daria to do the next vote candidate,  because I cannot be leading the session and more like chairing.  Who's in favour of...  to voting for the Alexander Hendorf in the board this next year?  Plus one, we have 17.  Okay, let's continue with Mark Andre Lambert,  chair, who's in favour.  So, that's 17, yes, abstain?  No.  Okay, then Alexander Savio, who's in favour.  Like, 17 in favour, abstain?  No, yeah, zero, zero, 17 in favour.  Okay, then we need to elect a chair of the board.  I basically nominated myself again, which, I mean, no one wants to do this, so...  Who's in favour of Mark Andre's, they are well-beloved chair.  So, I see 17 in favour, just like abstain?  No, so 17 in favour, zero, zero.  Then we have something new this year.  This is kind of like a bit of a last-minute thing.  We wanted to add a new position to the EPS, vice chair position,  because the bylaws currently only have a chair position,  and because the chair is rather important for the EPS,  because the chair has to essentially sign the contracts,  if the chair breaks away, then basically the EPS becomes, well, dysfunctional,  so it cannot operate anymore.  And what we think is it would be a good idea to have a vice chair position,  so that the vice chair can then basically fulfil the chair positions,  in case the chair has to step down, or just...  It's not available anymore.  So, it says, please vote here, you haven't seen the changes.  These are the changes.  So you can just... I can just read them.  So one change is that we have, on the agenda for the General Assembly,  we're going to add election of the vice chair person of the board,  and then position 13, it now says the board consists of a chair person,  the vice chair person, and two to seven board members.  Previously, we had just a chair person and two to eight board members.  The chair not being counted in this case as board member.  And in this case, in case the chair person steps down during the election term,  the vice chair person shall replace the chair person for the remainder of the term.  In case the vice chair person steps down as well,  the board may elect an intermediate chair for the remaining of the term,  or call in a General Assembly to vote in a new board.  So this is what we'd...  The old board would like to suggest as change.  We need to vote on this.  Does anyone have any issues with this?  I mean, just maybe all questions before we vote.  Okay, let's vote.  Who's in favor for this bylaws change?  Yeah, 17 in favor.  Abstain.  No.  So this being effective now, we need to vote on a vice chair.  And Alexander nominated himself, or I pushed him to.  Who is in favor of Alexander Fender for the co-chair?  17.  Who is abstain?  No.  17.  Okay, next thing.  So we need again an auditor for the bank accounts,  and we need one replacement against the auditor becomes unavailable  to do the actual auditing.  Any volunteers for this?  Okay, so who's in favor that Stefan...  Who's in favor of Stefan?  It's the auditor for the European Society.  It's just for one year, so...  So 17.  Yes, abstain.  Nobody against, also nobody.  And we need a replacement or basically a backup.  Yes, and I think...  Yeah, we need one more replacement auditor.  We need a volunteer because Raul was doing it before,  it's not here, unfortunately.  And actually it's an easy job.  Actually, I started as an auditor in Berlin.  So it's an easy thing.  So it's the auditor...  We need to speed up a bit.  Yeah, it's an auditor, it must be an auditor member.  No.  No? Okay, then Mario volunteered to be an auditor.  So who's in favor of Mario Teal to become the replacement auditor  or like backup auditor?  Okay, I see 17 in favor.  Abstain.  No.  Okay, just to double check because you raised your hand.  Are your EPS members?  Are you already EPS members?  Could I just ask what's the next session after this one?  Yeah, just like check.  Okay, so 17 yes and 0 abstains and 0 noes.  Coffee break.  Coffee break, okay.  So can we overrun a bit?  Yeah, it's a 3.45.  Okay, so let's just speed up a bit and then...  So that we managed this.  So the next thing is optional election of a nomination committee.  The idea being that we have a committee that basically then  checks all the nominations and proposes them to for the next election.  We've so far never needed this.  We don't think we're going to.  So the board thinks that this is not needed, but it's really up to you.  I mean, if you think this is needed, then please pick up.  Otherwise we can vote on not having it.  So who's...  Who's in favour that we set...  Let's say who's okay that there's no election committee...  nomination committee for as proposed by the board.  Okay, that's 17 yes.  Obstain, no.  Thank you.  Okay, we're almost done.  So budget presentation.  So basically this is what we did with the money that we had.  Like I said, we funded a few smaller events.  We also started buying for this conference.  We started buying goods that we want to keep as EPS.  Those will be EPS owned.  So we bought power strips quite a lot, 150 or 140 of those.  We bought the roll up displays that you see around here,  the schedule banner, the large one outside.  Those were all bought in a way that you can reuse them in future years.  So we're going to put everything into storage box here in Rimini,  and then when we have the location for the next conference,  we're just going to ship everything over there.  We bought the TVs, we bought routers, we bought EPS for the wireless backup EPS  using mobile SIM cards.  We rented the storage box for everything,  and we have regular expense, which is the only regular expense that we have.  It's the web server.  It's about 100 euros per month.  And everything else that we did was basically handled by Mateo from  Python Italia with the help of Christian.  Because Christian Lennett has credit card because Python Italia doesn't have one.  And for buying an Amazon unique one, so he helped a lot there.  So this is basically the budget presentation that we have.  I could also show you the budget, but we don't have time for that now, unfortunately.  I can show you later on if you want to, or you can just come to me.  So we need to vote on accepting the budget,  and we need to vote on the decision on the membership fees.  So far the membership fees have always been, not always actually,  they were one euro in the early days, but no one actually collected the euro.  And then at some point we set it to zero, which is more realistic.  Right.  It's like two votes now?  Yeah, it's two votes, yes.  So who's in favor that we accept the budget as proposed?  And see.  Abstain.  Okay, that's one abstain.  Who's against the budget?  Who does this as well?  How do you think that we would consider five euros in the end?  No, no, no, we're on the budget.  We're on the slide before.  We're on the budget vote.  Okay.  So, okay, then again, who's in favor that this budget is fine for our financial plan?  It's just a planning thing, actually.  So, we're on the budget vote, and we're on the budget vote.  So, what's the budget?  We're on the budget.  Okay, then again, who's in favor that we accept the budget?  So, what's the budget?  Yeah, I think.  I think.  No, I think.  No, the thing is, I mean, we only have like 180 members, or do you know?  180 to.  And basically collecting the money, five euros, which I think would be a fair amount, but we also would have like a lot of administration stuff, and we would carry.  And we would have to do that, and, you know, like getting people's bank accounts and stuff.  So, I don't think I don't think we really make any money from it worth the effort.  That's why.  Okay, any more comments?  Ideas?  Raise it to 1,000 euros now.  Because then the administration is over.  So, okay.  That would be a realistic amount too.  Who's in favor that we, the membership fee stays at zero euros for next year?  I think that's the farm, like 17.  Obstains?  No, like 17 in favor.  No, things.  Okay.  Forget the please vote here because we have not received any motions from the members.  So, we can skip this.  And we're done.  So, if you have any questions, please ask now.  Or if it's something specific to 2018, then please come to the open space session.  Otherwise, I'd say thank you.  Thank you.
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