Its been a month now since EuroPython 2024 took place and as the dust settles, we’ve gathered feedback from 157 attendees to understand what made this year’s event special, what challenges were faced, and how the experience can shape future EuroPythons. Whether you were there in person or followed along online, join us as we dive into the analysing the feedback!
The data we have represents around 13% of the onsite attendees and around 11% of total attendees. It is difficult to tell whether this is a representative sample as we did not collect demographic data.
Satisfaction with the conference
Attendees were overall very satisfied with the conference, with a mean overall satisfaction rating of 4.3. Moreover, attendees were satisfied with most specific aspects of the conference, including the venue (mean = 4.6), food (mean = 4.0), and the social event (mean = 4.0). Attendees particularly liked that the conference was hosted in Prague, with the location getting a mean rating of 4.7.
Overall, the satisfaction ratings that had the strongest relationship (Spearman correlation) with overall satisfaction with the conference were the food (rs = 0.20) and the social event (rs = 0.17); however, these are still very modest correlations, indicating that other factors we did not measure were stronger drivers of satisfaction with the conference
Mean and standard deviation of ratings per conference aspectThings that people liked about the conference
Two of the feedback survey questions were free text which asked attendees to comment on what they did and did not like overall about the conference. Ninety-seven respondents gave positive feedback, and 92 gave negative feedback.
In order to make these easier to analyse, used a large language model to extract the topics that each attendee was talking about in their responses. This was by no means perfect, so take it as a guide rather than something totally objective (e.g., “organisation” was pretty broadly interpreted by the model).
The top topics (where at least 5 people had mentioned them in their feedback) in the “liked” feedback are listed below.
Liked topics | Number of respondents who mentioned topic |
Community | 37 |
Food | 20 |
Organisation | 19 |
Talks | 16 |
Networking | 14 |
Atmosphere | 14 |
Venue | 10 |
Communication | 5 |
Location | 5 |
We have also plotted these topics by their mentions for better understanding
With a general overview of the feedback on EuroPython 2024 in mind, let&aposs delve into specific aspects of the conference such as the food, talks, workshops, and more
Food & Catering
As noted above in the first graph, people were overall satisfied with the food. When breaking this down by dietary requirements, satisfaction varied a bit more.
Note: we have very small samples for some of these special dietary groups,
Dietary requirement | Total respondents | Mean satisfaction rating |
None | 115 | 4.13 |
Vegetarian | 23 | 3.82 |
Vegan | 11 | 4.00 |
Gluten-free | 2 | 3.50 |
Lactose-intolerant | 4 | 4.00 |
Low-carb | 2 | 3.50 |
Halal | 4 | 3.00 |
Kosher | 1 | 5.00 |
Other | 2 | 2.50 |
Average Satisfaction with food grouped by Dietary requirementsPyLadies workshops
Only 28 respondents indicated that they had attended at least one PyLadies workshop, so we should interpret the below findings with caution. However, mean satisfaction with the PyLadies events was high (4.43). Below is the breakdown of mean satisfaction per PyLadies event (some people attended multiple events, hence the total exceeds 28).
PyLadies event | Total respondents | Mean satisfaction rating |
Wednesday evening social event | 16 | 4.43 |
Self-Defense workshop | 7 | 4.29 |
PyLadies lunch | 16 | 4.38 |
#IAmRemarkable workshop | 1 | 5.00 |
Community tutorials
Only 8 respondents indicated that they had attended at least one of the community tutorials so unfortunately this means we cannot break down the data by tutorial. However, the overall mean satisfaction rating was high (4.0).
Talks
Attendees were asked to give feedback on which talks they particularly liked, and which ones they didn&apost like. 104 attendees gave feedback on which talks they liked, and 59 gave feedback on talks they did not like.
We normalised the feedback by matching it up to the closest title, and then checking this manually. The findings are broken down below by talk level, type and track, as well as the most liked speakers.
Level
Attendees seemed to enjoy talks across all levels equally, with around 4 times more people liking versus disliking talks at each level.
Talk level | Number of talks at conference | Number of liked talks | Number of disliked talks | Average number of likes per talk | Average number of dislikes per talk | Ratio of likes to dislikes |
beginner | 65 | 138 | 35 | 2.1 | 0.54 | 3.9 |
intermediate | 93 | 178 | 46 | 1.9 | 0.49 | 3.9 |
advanced | 14 | 23 | 6 | 1.6 | 0.43 | 3.8 |
Type
By far the most popular type of talk were long talk sessions. These talks received a lot of feedback, with 15 times more attendees saying they liked these talks versus disliking them. The keynotes were also well received, with 4 times more people mentioning liking them versus disliking them.
Posters were only mentioned once in the feedback. While it is hard to say from this feedback as it does not measure attendance, it is possible these sessions were not well attended.
Talk type | Number of talks at conference | Number of liked talks | Number of disliked talks | Average number of likes per talk | Average number of dislikes per talk | Ratio of likes to dislikes |
Talk (long session) | 25.0 | 61.0 | 4.0 | 2.4 | 0.16 | 15.2 |
Keynote | 6.0 | 84.0 | 20.0 | 14 | 3.33 | 4.2 |
Talk | 92.0 | 174.0 | 51.0 | 1.9 | 0.55 | 3.4 |
Tutorial | 16.0 | 9.0 | 5.0 | 0.6 | 0.31 | 1.8 |
Sponsored | 8.0 | 8.0 | 6.0 | 1 | 0.75 | 1.3 |
Conference Workshop | 1.0 | 0.25 | ||||
Panel | 2.0 | 2.0 | 1 | |||
Poster | 9.0 | 1.0 | 0.1 |
Track
While it is hard to draw robust conclusions for this category as there are very small samples in most of the tracks, some particularly popular tracks (with a high ratio of likes to dislikes and high number of overall likes) are:
- Arts, Crafts Culture & Demos
- Testing and QA
- Career, Life, Health
- Python Libraries and Tooling
- Python Internals & Ecosystem
track | Number of talks at conference | Number of liked talks | Number of disliked talks | Average number of likes per talk | Average number of dislikes per talk | Ratio of likes to dislikes |
Arts, Crafts Culture & Demos | 3 | 30 | 1.0 | 10.0 | 0.33 | 30.0 |
Testing and QA | 5 | 17 | 1.0 | 3.4 | 0.2 | 17.0 |
Career, Life, Health | 4 | 28 | 2.0 | 7.0 | 0.5 | 14.0 |
PyData: Deep Learning, NLP, CV | 8 | 7 | 1.0 | 0.88 | 0.13 | 7.0 |
DevOps and Infrastructure (Cloud & Hardware) | 5 | 13 | 2.0 | 2.6 | 0.4 | 6.5 |
Python Libraries & Tooling | 23 | 49 | 10.0 | 2.13 | 0.43 | 4.9 |
Web technologies | 9 | 4 | 1.0 | 0.44 | 0.11 | 4.0 |
Python Internals & Ecosystem | 24 | 62 | 18.0 | 2.58 | 0.75 | 3.4 |
Education, Community & Diversity | 7 | 19 | 7.0 | 2.71 | 1.0 | 2.7 |
PyData: LLMs | 10 | 15 | 6.0 | 1.5 | 0.6 | 2.5 |
PyData: Data Engineering | 10 | 9 | 4.0 | 0.9 | 0.4 | 2.3 |
Software Engineering & Architecture | 14 | 31 | 14.0 | 2.21 | 1.0 | 2.2 |
Security | 6 | 4 | 3.0 | 0.67 | 0.5 | 1.3 |
PyData: Machine Learning, Stats | 7 | 3 | 3.0 | 0.43 | 0.43 | 1.0 |
~ None of these topics | 3 | 1 | 1.0 | 0.33 | 0.33 | 1.0 |
PyData: Research & Applications | 6 | 1 | 2.0 | 0.17 | 0.33 | 0.5 |
Ethics, Philosophy & Politics | 1 | 1 | 1.0 | |||
PyData: Software Packages & Jupyter | 5 | 7 | 1.4 |
Special thank you to our amazing data wizard Jodie Burchell for putting together together this report!
If you have any questions, you are welcome to reach out to the team at helpdesk@europython.eu