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:
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:
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.
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)
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.
