Marc-André Lemburg

Senior Solution Architect, Python Core Developer, Consultant, Trainer and Coach

EuroPython Society (EPS)

The EuroPython Society (EPS) was founded in 2004 to give the organization of the EuroPython conference series a more formal background.

The EuroPython conference series was started in 2002 as first ever major community run Python conference in Charleroi, Belgium. I was one of the members of the executive committee, together with Denis and Tom.

Joining the EPS Board

By 2012, the EPS had mostly become inactive and it was rebooted at EuroPython 2012 with a new board. This is when I joined the EPS as board member to help with the effort of turning the EPS into a fully functional organization again.

Introducing a new operational structure

In 2014, the EPS secured the EuroPython trademark and started to establish a new organizational structure based on work groups, which was put in place late in 2014 and used to run the EuroPython 2015 and later conference editions.

Preparing the EPS to take on more financial organizational risks

Starting in 2015, we strived to have the EPS play a more central role in the EuroPython conference organization by taking on the financial risks of entering venue and catering contracts.

We quickly ran into a problem, though, because the EPS could not secure a VAT ID in Sweden, needed for doing cross-EU trading, so had to fall back to the approach of having the on-site organization do most of the contract and billing work. We ran another attempt to get a VAT-ID in 2016, which finally succeeded.

We’re still considering moving the EPS to another EU country, perhaps Belgium, to simplify management.

Heading for broader Python community support

In 2016, we changed the EPS mission to be not only an organization for running Python conferences in Europe, but also one serving the Python community in general in Europe.

Over the next years, we hope to establish a financial buffer which allows us to give out grants to smaller conferences, workshops and events, as well as help with the communication between the various Python groups in Europe.

Chairing the EPS and EuroPython

In 2016, I took over the chair position from Fabio Pliger, who had been chairing since 2012.

I worked on adding more structure to the EPS, finding better project management tools, adding a commercial RFP process for selecting venue and making the workgroup structure work fully remotely.

As the EuroPython conference became more successful, we managed to build up a sizeable disaster recovery buffer, enabling the EPS to lose the complete budget for a single in-person conference edition (around 600k EUR) without going bankrupt.

The EPS now is well-positioned to focus more on grants for other conferences and projects in Europe.

In Oct 2021, I stepped down as EPS chair, after having run 5 editions of the conference: three in-person editions EP2017 in Rimini/Italy, EP2018 in Edinburgh/Scotland and EP2019 in Basel/Switzerland, and two online editions EP2020 and EP2021.

I also did not run for board again, having served for 9 years, to make room for new candidates and to finally go back to enjoying the conference from the attendee / speaker perspective.

My EPS Projects