No More Spreadsheets! Let's Build a Conference Management tool with Django

Hi everybody. Thank you so much for having me and inviting me to Django Note Space. I'm really excited. I've been following the progress of the Django Note space. I really feel like it's inspiring. I it's It's a great way to onboard new contributors, especially in the underrepresented group community. So thank you that to give me this opportunity to speak to you My talk today is about not using spreadsheets. And since you have been contributing to Django, you will know more about that. You know, we can do this with Django. But before I start, whoops, where's my stuff?

Waiting for my hold on. My clicker 's not working. Okay, so first of all, congratulations on your journey so far. As m as Rachel mentioned, I've been contributing to open source for many years and I found that it's a very fulfilling journey. It's also been uh life-changing experience for me. It lets me learn new things. It lets me grow. It gives me a lot more opportunities and improving my career, things I didn't know was possible before. And it's all thanks to contributing to open source. And that's one of the reasons like I'm really excited that you're all doing this. And you might be thinking like after you're done with the Django Not

space program, what can you do next? So I'm here to give you an idea of what other projects you can contribute to Um as mentioned, my name is Marietta and I've been contributing and maintaining open source projects specifically in the Python space since a long time almost 10 years now that it feels just like yesterday i received awards in the open source space i just became a tsf member um I think just less than a year, maybe less than four months. So I'm really excited that it's the Django community has been special to me. It's like It's the first Django Con was the first conference where I actually give a talk ever.

And it launched my speaking career. Well, not career. My public speaking journey. I never get paid to to speak, so. But it's just a special committee to me. Um on top of all that, I'm a serial conference organizer. I've been running conferences since by cascades. PyCon US and now I'm helping with PyLadiesCon. So I want to talk more about specifically about PyLadiesCon PileDiscon is an online conference. It is a multilingual and multi-time zones conference, unlike in-person events or or maybe even other kind of conferences where they are localized and into

certain location. We are global. We take care of our global community instead of just having program in specific Specific time zone. We have talks, keynotes, panels in all the time zones. And we try to be accessible and affordable because one of the reasons the things we hear from the community is like attending conferences. it gives them opportunities to improve, but it also comes with financial burden. So when we and when we were talking about having conference like PilatesCon We didn't want it to be only affordable by people who have jobs. We just want people to come without having to worry about

financing. And therefore It's free. We made it free. And our goal is to raise money through sponsorships instead of burdening our attendees with with you know paying conference tickets. And the goal really is to continue to fulfill the mission of PyLadies, which is to help more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open source community. By providing this space, this community, providing opportunities for people to showcase their work, to network with other community members, and to learn about open source contributions. Now, as mentioned, I've been running conferences for a long time, and running an online conference like PyLady Discon

is truly unique. It's very different Usually I would be working or collaborating with people in my same time zone. We will all be collaborating only in with in English. But our volunteers, our organizers are spread across the world. Um, so we need a lot like we have organizers or community members who volunteer whose Who's not comfortable in English? For example, I was offering speaker mentorship last year to people who want to present it by Ladies Khan and one of the person who reached out to me, she said, okay, we met up. I I we set up a meeting and she just, you know what, I'm not

I cannot speak English. Um can you pair me up with a Portuguese speaking mentor and that's what we did. And this is something that we don't see in other events. At least I haven't seen it. Um, so we really have very unique challenges and because of our effort to be inclusive, we rely a lot on our volunteers. And as well because we we have smaller budget than most other conferences. We rely on volunteers. Like we we use free software, free products And we need a lot of coordinations among our different types of groups

of volunteers. And that's the challenge of our conference, like coordinating among people all over the world. Taking care in taking into consideration language barriers, time zone differences. So We deal this by having lots of spreadsheets. Uh we don't have a lot of we didn't even pay for a lot of subscription things. We have just spreadsheets because you know it's free. We all have Google cloud accounts already. We all have Gmail. We all have, you know, some form of online cloud provider that is free. That's what we've been using. We have we wanna collect data about okay who wants to sign up to volunteer.

We have a spreadsheet for that. We need to schedule our speakers, moderators, who will be a backup speaker for this, a backup moderator in case the moderator suddenly couldn't come. We need spreadsheet for sponsorship. We need spreadsheet for managing all of our promotional assets, designs. Um we and we also like we transcribe our speakers' talks and we try to translate them. So we have a spreadsheet to track where is where can we find the the video for the speaker where is this the transcript where is the translation who has translated this and that who has not work on

who has not who are free and can have time to download the speaker of video and transcribe it like all of this are on spreadsheet. And it's it's really frustrating in the end because there's just too many spreadsheets and spreads we realize that spreadsheets is not the best way to manage or to collaborate. I think spreadsheets are probably good for something else, but it's not Good. When you are collaborating, when you need to always update the data, um just think about Volunteers sign up. What if they sign up and then they change their email address or they change their their availability? Like

How do they tell us that they have that they have these changes? A lot of time they just don't tell us anything and we just hope we thought that the spreadsheet is the right source of truth Or they send us an email saying, hey, can you please change this data? And then we take this the information, we go to the spreadsheet and update it. Like there's a lot of this back and forth emails communication copy pasting and it's also and because we work with a lot of volunteers across the globe It's hard to share these spreadsheets. Like you either have to share the entire spreadsheet or nothing at all. But sometimes you don't actually want to share the entire spreadsheet, right?

Maybe you want to share just five columns of this. Maybe the other columns are you know private or sensitive. like email address or person 's address actual home address like it's not something we want to be sharing So there's a lot of concerns about privacy and in spreadsheets. It's easy to change things. It's easy to accidentally change things, right? Because there's no no fine-tuned permissions built in with it. So spreadsheets not the right way to manage your community or a conference So just to be a little bit more detailed, here's an example of when we take in our sponsor.

The sponsor writes to us saying we want a sponsor and then Sure we tell them yes please please give us your company name your logo your website whatever and they they send us things We copy-paste, put it into spreadsheet, download the logo, and then we upload this logo to G Drive. And then we tell our volunteers, hey, we have a new sponsor, take this logo, make some magic So this is just part one of the sponsors. We get company logo. The next is that okay, our designer will download it. make it beautiful, create promotional assets, and then somebody else will have to download the logo, put it on our website, put it elsewhere, I don't know.

And then our social media will also Well, we're gonna download the f the logo and then we're gonna come up with you know thank you posts on social media, right? And at the end of a conference, as a conference chair, I need to download the logo, I need to recognize the sponsors and put it there and say thank you. Like there just one asset is being used in many ways. And it's a lot of downloading and copy-pasting. It's it's uh it's frustrating And I want to show you an example of the spreadsheet. Just look at it. Look at this spreadsheet. How can you read it? There are like, I don't know, 20 different columns. Um, it's hard to

I c I cannot read this. You know, I have a big screen. Even I struggle having to scroll all the way to find the right information. This is just one spreadsheet, one tap of the spreadsheet for managing the schedule We this spreadsheet have like maybe five, seven different tabs. So our spreadsheet situation looks more like this. There's way too many things. It's I it's We cannot do this anymore. No more spreadsheets. I don't wanna work with spreadsheets. If somebody else tell me please sign up through this Google Forms, I'm going to

Okay, I'll stop it. It's it's wrong. This is not the right way to use spreadsheets. And we what we need is not spreadsheets. We need an actual database, like an actual infrastructure. And we have the technology for this. We know this is what Django is for, this is what Python is for. So let's Why like we're all developers too? We're all Python people. We're all like I'm a Django person. I've been using Django for a long time. So it feels wrong to me to be using spreadsheets and not Django. So

why not build such a thing? Let's build it. We I know how to code. So instead of all of this copy pasting manually writing emails to sponsors, manually telling people, hey, the photo is like the logo is ready. Let's download it and create things, you know, instead of having these tiny spreadsheets with tiny font, hard to share, hard to see What if we have an actual web page, web app, you know, where the sponsor can can help themselves. They can just, yeah, they'll they'll upload this through the website instead of us asking them, instead of us copy-pasting, let them upload it on a web

app. Let them fill this in all information. Maybe instead of us trying to convince, like change their mind about sponsorship package, maybe they come in and say I just want a bronze Maybe we could have this upsell opportunity. Let the code, let the website do this upsell. Like are you sure you just want the bronze? Maybe if you add a few more dollars, you can get extra perts, you know It can all be done through an app. And we've seen this, right? Whenever you sign up for any products, like this technology exists. Why are we not doing the same thing for our conference? For you know. And instead of sponsorship, sponsors having to come and say

what is the status of our application of our sponsorship sponsorship are you ready or if they have some changes instead of them sending us an email like they should be able to do that On a web app. They can edit their own sponsorship. And if they want to cancel, they don't need to write an email, hey, I'm sorry, we have to cancel. Just click that. Okay. We are volunteers. We have a lot of things going on when we run the conference. Um well maybe we could build in a new idea. We could build in another automated message. Are you sure you wanna cancel? What if I don't know lots of ideas here, lots of opportunities to improve our sponsorship workflow And that's just I'm talking just about sponsorship.

We have other aspects. Oh, I should talk more about this. Like so instead of Um us having to read spreadsheets now we will be able to just have a dashboard with all of the sponsorship status. So instead of manually sending an email saying, hey, can you please make the payment or here's the contract, blah blah blah, we could just click a button. And everything's happening. Like save time for our volunteers. And as I mentioned earlier, like we need to all as a conference. leaders, um, we need to recognize sponsorship. We also need to know what's the status of sponsorship.

We used to have to once a week we go to the spreadsheet, tally everything up, and then we share with our Team members. This month we made we have sponsorship this much. We still have blah blah blah pending. Why do we need to look at spreadsheets? We should have Something calculating it for us. We should have Python and Django do all of this reporting for us. Like everybody should be able to come in and see this number without having to go to the spreadsheet. So This is just one. This is just possibility of how our sponsorship can be improved. We can, I think if we have this kind of portal, we can really improve our volunteer coordination.

speaker coordinations uh like all of this can be done if we build something with Django and we're calling it the PyLady scon web portal this is what we want to build And once we have such a thing, we will be able to further integrate with all other platforms that we are using. We are already using pre-talks, we are already using pre -tix We have Discord last year with um we have some kind of game going on during the conference. So we want to be able to integrate with that Google Drive, we're probably still gonna use Google Drive, but at least now we will be able to write code to interact with it. we will be able to transcribe and translate our

talks using AI and maybe only leave the rest of the verification, human the last step of human verification. we we will be able to do that, but it should we shouldn't need to download 30 different videos for this in order to do the transcript. It should just be running on the cloud somewhere. So we want to build such a thing. And I've started the open source project. I can give a little bit of demo here. Give me a minute here. I'll show you what we have so far. Okay, uh just showing where's my screen here.

What's that second so ta -da we have something called by Ladiescon web portal um it smaller here. It is hosted on something called Cabo Touch, which is the PSF infrastructure. It is the same infrastructure that powers PyPI So we're grateful for the support from the PSF's infrastructure team. So in this portal you can sign up for an account I already signed up so I will show you a little bit of what's what's already made. I can log in. Um then

once I log in I can create a profile because I haven't put in my last name my names yet so let's just put something here and I agree to the coc now once i'm logged in i i created a profile i can choose different ways to to support the conference i guess i can volunteer Maybe if people are interested in sponsoring, they can click the sponsor. And if they are one of the speakers, this is where they will be able to log in. manage all of that video upload transcript transcribing or requesting fund for their recording equipment Like instead of them sending us the receipt, we'll ask them to upload it here. It'll be easy.

An example for signing up to volunteer, they can a prof volunteer profile basically this is where they get to say I'm a volunteer I'm a multilingual I can speak well I just speak English. They will be able to choose which team they want to volunteer for. They can say what chapter they are in if they have it, but it this will be optional um because of our global community we need to know where they are located so or what time zone they are in in order to better schedule them for task. and everything and they can enter all their information and click submit

and that's all That's all we got so far. At least instead of Google Forms, they will be signed up through a portal like this, and I wanna I want to give them the button that they can edit their their profile or they can change their volunteer their information or if they have a different email they can change it here. So we will always know how that we can get in touch with them. This is all I got so far. Um but yeah, but we have lots we have big ideas of what we wanna build here And this is where we need we need help. Let's go back to

my presentation if I can figure out how. Let's go back. So that was a demo. Let's see. Right-click it here. Okay, so the that portal you just saw, it's I build it using Python 3. 13, Django 5. 1. 7, which is the latest I could find right now. It is Postgres database and as mentioned is supported by the PSF infrastructure , the same infrastructure that powers PyPI. We are the first and so far the only non-PSF infrastructure who was allowed

to take advantage of this. And all of the signups things that you see just now, it's it was very easy for me to build it out because it's done by Django Alloth. I didn't need to come up with my own And I didn't need to come up with my own code on how to handle, you know, email change and everything. So Django Auth libraries, what we're using for that. So right now we have just been accepted as a Google Summer of Code uh project. under the Python suborg and I've created a lot of issues and I try my best to label them and I also try my best to like really describe what I want

this ticket for like what features we want um to be built and we also have a project board and milestones and if you notice the milestones we have very ambitious timeline. We we have a conference in December or so. So we need all of this done. tomorrow right away just because we we want to start taking sponsorships we want to start people to sign up to volunteer and so we we need to get working on this portal So there's just lots and lots of contribution opportunities. Coding, you can do that. We need

documentation. There is nothing yet. I didn't even have CI I don't have unit tests written. So we need lots of help. And of course you can help us with UI. I'm not a front-end person. I don't know how to do I don't know how to design. So everything has been like basic. Lots of contributions opportunities here if you are looking for a project to contribute. One of the things that I really wish we have, again, I just created this project last week in preparation to speaking to you all. So we got we got some code But we don't have any documentation yet and I realize that's something we need in order for contributors to come. Like I don't

I Yeah, read me is not a documentation to me. We need an actual how to contribute and we also need a user guide. Like how can a user use this this portal? How can user sign up, change email, blah blah blah those needs to be documented so that if there's if docs is something you're interested in check out the issue um and definitely Everything's on the English right now, but I know Django supports translations, internationalizations. So we should be able to do this without trouble, right? Maybe somebody just needs to set it up so that people can start traveling. translating. So I really wish it is not just in English, in order to support all of our global volunteers.

None. I have a very easy ticket. I know how to do this, but I'm just gonna leave it there in case someone else wanna take it as the you know their first contribution Basically we just need a banner on the website. Like maybe it's even a one line saying this is such a demo. You can sign up, you can play with it, but It's a demo, we might delete your data afterward. Just say demo site or staging or whatever. So it's an open ticket if anybody wanna contribute to that. There's just lots lots of ways for you to contribute. If you want to get started to get in touch with the rest of the Pile Discord community, you can join us on Discord.

I will share the link after this. Check out the issues. Of course, open the PRs if you are ready for it. Use the GitHub discussions. I've enabled that feature. Just ask questions. Ask questions in the repo or ask question on Discord test it out I think I'm the only one who ever download the like whoever Test out the the get setup thing. So I don't know if my documentation is even accurate. So that's that will be something that could be helpful for as well. If there are other kind of documentation you think we need you wish have existed, just report it open and ticket saying I wish we have documentation about this

So yeah, feel free to try it out and suggest improvements to us. Other ways you can support The conference is by donating. You can help fund the development of this project. Again, I wish we have that sponsorship portal up already, but for now you can donate to us directly using this link and so yeah that's all I wanna share the links to the repository it's in the Pylady D slide my ladiescon dash portal and I shared the link to our Discord. Once you join go to the portal dev channel to to discuss about this project. So That's my presentation.

Thank you so much for watching and listening and I really hope we see you contributing to this project. Thank you.