Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Free ticket for finding us participants

Here's an experiment we want to try out - using power of the community to sell tickets and target the benefit from the work to the person doing the work. Perhaps that is you?

Let's talk about this a little more! 

European Testing Conference 2020 takes place Feb 6-7th  in Amsterdam and as we pay our speakers, we have quite a relevant ticket price. We try to make profit, to share profit. And this enables us great contents.

You'd want to participate, but the ticket price blocks you? Ask us for a code you share to people to recommend joining the conference, and when four (4) people have used your code, you get a free ticket for yourself.

To make it a little easier, we will add a 50 euro discount into the code your contacts get. So they get their tickets a little cheaper, and you get a free ticket.

We'd much rather give the benefits to the community than pay a faceless advertising company. Thus the experiment. 

So what to do if you're willing to try this out?

Let us know at contact@europeantestingconference.eu  and we respond with your personalized code.

We could use some helping hands, the conference is all organized by volunteers and we would love to reach all the relevant people who might be interested in our conference. We think we have built quite a unique learning and networking experience where the diversity of formats of sessions will ensure you don't need to be a social butterfly to get to know people.

How The Volunteering Organizers Do it?

Finding people who would want to participate is kind of big thing for a conference. We try these ideas, and they could also work for you:
  • LinkedIn contacts - we browse through our personal connections who could be interested in hearing that we have a conference and learning about its contents. This is a very personal way, and we try to know who of our connections would be ok hearing us, and how they would be ok hearing it. Respecting your style, your voice and your connections is key. 
  • LinkedIn timeline - seems to reach quite a number of people, and is less in-you-face than messaging your contacts. Sharing your code is key here. You don't want people to have to do extra to take action. 
  • Twitter - works only if you have a following. 
  • Facebook groups - sharing in groups of professionals in the style they consider ok. We are often uncomfortable just advertising, and put a bit of effort in for example taking our favorite speaker in the conference, and discussing something they say, combining it with a message there's a conference and we've got a discount. Your personality shining is usually a positive thing. 
  • Talk to friends, acquintances, strangers and especially colleagues - tell the folks you have access to that they could join. Tell them it benefits you personally. If their interest aligns, things move for your benefit.  
  • Share in your community - you may be a community organizer yourself. Get a ticket by them joining. And if you are not the person to use it, pass it on as a freebie in your communities. 
 If you have ideas, please share! And, we hope to see *you* at the conference. 

Monday, September 16, 2019

Announcing Keynotes for 2020 edition

European Testing Conference 2020 proudly presents our four keynotes:

Ulrika Malmgren (Sweden) is an international speaker, and a tester turned developer. With significant portion of her 15 year career in testing positions, she is no stranger to exploratory testing and team work, and uses that platform to build software in the .Net world. Her talks are insightful and challenging, and we welcome her perspectives as a foundation for a conference bridging testing as testers as developers know it.

Patricia Aas (Norway) is a programmer experiences in C++ as well as many other languages. Some of the specialties we know her for are building secure applications and not shying away from discussions around diversity. As our perspective in building this conference is that testing is about breaking illusions, Patricia shines on looking at phenomena around us critically and summarizing it into brilliant talks.

Mirjam Bauerlein (Germany) is known for her work with making conferences less intimidating through creating Conference Buddy. As someone joining software after a career outside software industry, she is a test-driven development practitioner from the start. As programmer, she comes from the JavaScript side of things, and for us in many ways represent the wonderful new generation of programmers who have always tested and cared for testing.

Maaike Brinkhof (the Netherlands) is an established testing expert and an international conference speaker. We know her best for her work with exploratory testing and biases, and her attention to detail on how teams collaborate and work together to test systems. While she works in team under the title "tester", you may notice that the things she contributes and shares on stretch the limits of tester role in  positive way.

You may notice we put special care in selecting a set of all European keynotes for the 2020 edition. Our keynote selection matches the vision we have on where testing is going: having a strong, local presence and breaking the role walls if they still exist. We all work together, and have versatile views into what the future and practice of testing could be.

Welcome to European Testing Conference 2020 in Amsterdam, February 6-7th. Super Early Bird Tickets are available until end of September, when the full program is announced. People buying their tickets by Sept 20th will be asked to participate in voting for talks to select into the conference from the results of Call for Collaboration that finished Sept 15th.

Sunday, August 4, 2019

Call for Collaboration for 2020 Edition, Amsterdam Feb 6-7th

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: European Testing Conference 2020 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands 6.-7.2.2020 (5th edition) Compensation: Speaker travel expenses guaranteed by the conference.
Deadline: Schedule your call before September 15th 2019.

SUBMIT

Our conference 

European Testing Conference 2020 takes place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands February 6-7th. 2020. 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 the 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 software craft and (exploratory) testing backgrounds.

We ask you to collaborate on two types of sessions:
  • Talks of ideas with practical applicability / Demos of ideas in use (30 minutes) 
  • 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 September 15th.

If the call intimidates you, allow us a prioritization without the call (we contact you if you’re idea seems like a MUST have) through this: https://forms.gle/YXB91G5QYn1CdD9B7 - we prefer the chance to meet, so this is a secondary choice.

What we have to offer:

  • entry to participate and present at a great conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands 6-7.2.2020 
  • travel expenses (coach) 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.

Sunday, July 28, 2019

Launching the 2020 Edition!

European Testing Conference 2020 will take place in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Yes, we are revisiting Amsterdam. What draws us there is the central location which so conveniently brings together us organizers from all around Europe, and the fact that working with the venue there was particularly straightforward. And Amsterdam is a lovely city, with lovely people.

European Testing Conference 2020 happens at Johan Cruijff ArenA on February 6-7th.

This announcement starts the usual cycle:

  • We are calling for collaboration, to figure out together what is the great content we want to showcase this year
  • We are soon opening ticket sales, offering best discounts to returning participants and early birds
We look forward to learning with you in this 5th edition of European Testing Conference. 

A Community Marketing Experiment