Closing European Testing Conference 2018 season

European Testing Conference 2018 took place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands February 19-20th. With just a little over 200 participants, our third year was a both a networking/learning and financial success.

We're a non-profit conference out on a mission to change the world of conferences. This means a few things:

• Our conference is on testing as different roles in software development overall know it. We love testers. We love developers. We love managers. We love product owners. And testing unites us all - we want to know the quality we are delivering, work on better ways towards feedback and figure out what mix of people would help each of us succeed. 
• Our speakers are not paying to speak. We guarantee we pay their out of pocket expenses with travel and hotel. They are professionals in the industry, that deserve not only to not pay to speak, but in fact be paid to speak. To manage the risk, we pay our speakers with profit sharing model.
• Our profits over the years are used to advance the speaker pool introducing underrepresented speakers. Financial reasons keep many great teachers local and with conferences not compensating for the travel, we want to figure out scholarships to support these people. With three years of European Testing Conference under our belt, we have supported three speakers by paying their travel for speaking. 

With 2018 edition of European Testing Conference profit-sharing, we pay:

• 1917 euros for a keynote speaker (45 min - 5 shares)
• 383 euros for a track speaker (30-40 min - 1 share)
• 1534 euros for workshop facilitator (2 sessions, 1.5 hours each - 4 shares)

Every speaker gets paid. Including the few who did their first ever talk and worked hard on fine-tuning their delivery with their mentors support.

We believe this is what conferences need to budget for, and continue our mission to build a conference that gets to the long term target: paying keynotes 5000 euros and track speakers 1000 euros.

We believe great work needs to be paid for. We believe that each of the speakers has spent their lifetime becoming the people they are on stage, teaching us from their experiences and that time is valuable. And we know they spend a lot of effort building the message they deliver.

Our organizer team for 2018 consists of:

• Maaret Pyhäjärvi (Finland)
• Llewellyn Falco (USA / Finland)
• Franziska Sauerwein (Switzerland)
• Simon (Peter) Schrijver (the Netherlands)
• Julia Duran (Spain)
• Alina Ionescu (Romania)

In addition, 2017 organizers Aki Salmi (Finland) and co-creator of European Testing Conference Adi Bolboaca (Romania) played a significant part. 

Our organizer team is volunteers and we don't get paid a salary. In fact, we are all working as manager, programmers and testers. Changing the world of conferences in a great company is something we do on the side. 

Call for Collaboration, ETC 2019

ETC 2019 Call for Collaboration Other conferences call for papers or proposals. We call for collaboration.

TL;DR: Propose an idea or outline for a session. We are selecting based on discussions via Skype/Hangouts. Event: ETC 2019 in Valencia, Spain 14.-15.2.2019. Compensation: Speaker travel expenses guaranteed by the conference. Deadline: Submit by August 19th 2018.

Submit

Our conference

European Testing Conference 2019 takes place in Valencia, Spain February 14.15. 2019. The conference travels annually to different locations in Europe.

We are setting up the best practical testing conference that represents testing as different people know it: testers, developers, business analysts and managers. We recognize that testing is continuous, and we want to learn to do its different flavors better through sharing ideas and experiences in spirit of dialog. We seek to understand.

Looking for sessions

To find the right people to share in this conference, we want to collaborate with the existing and emerging speaker communities. We find our professional home communities to be those of agile and context-driven testing, and software craftsmanship, but actively seek to break the walls between them.

We want a good balance of European and non-European speakers and a good balance of craftsmanship and (exploratory) testing backgrounds.

We ask you to collaborate on three types of sessions:

1. Talks of ideas with practical applicability (30 minutes)
2. Demos of ideas in use – show and tell (40 minutes)
3. Workshops of hands-on experiences for participants (90 minutes)

We ask you to collaborate, because we believe the best results come out of working together. We want you to share your topic and excitement, and collaborate before you invest heavily in making the session final as a proposal.

We acknowledge we can’t fit all the great sessions there are. So we want to make it mutually efficient while enabling great content we as organizers would be unaware of. We believe there’s more value out of the collaboration than just our conference talk selection through getting to know one another.

When you respond to the call and we’re considering you, we’ll have a 15-minute Skype/Hangouts session with you to talk about your idea. If you get cut from consideration just for not having space in our talk budget for your type of idea, we’ll let you know by email. We expect the finalized abstract from those who we choose, not as criteria of entry. Timeframe for the discussions is August and September, and this call closes on August 19th.

What we have to offer:

• entry to participate and present at a great conference in Valencia, Spain 14.-15.2.2019
• travel expenses and hotel 3 nights reimbursed
• Profit sharing – we share ½ of the profits with the speakers. You get part of the honorarium pot that translates to money, based on the conference’s financial success and the length of your session

What we expect:

• Speakers who can stay and participate for the duration of the conference. This is very important to having a great learning environment.

Come. Learn. Do. Teach. Test.