As highlighted in my initial post highlighting some of our PyCon 2013 sponsors - sponsors are critical for the conference as I have said before, they give back to the community as a whole, they allow PyCon to keep ticket prices low, they're a constant source of jobs within the community, and their sponsorship allows us to maintain a growing financial aid budget, and work with outreach groups such as Women Who Code, PyLadies, and many others for grants for people who would not otherwise be able to to come to PyCon.
Sponsorship is more than just about money - sure, there are tangible business benefits - but the social benefits are equally important and large. Keeping this in mind, I emailed our sponsors and asked them a few simple questions:
- What is your company using Python for, and why is it important to you (as an organization)?
- Why does sponsoring/attending PyCon 2013 make sense for your organization?
Continuing the series - here are some more awesome responses!
AWeber (Silver Level + Lanyard)
AWeber is using Python to support and extend our Software as a Service solution for email marketing. Python is important to AWeber because of the great community around it and the extensive set of capabilities it has, provided by either the python standard library or 3rd party packages. The overall philosophy Python espouses with the Zen of Python also aligns very well with the philosophy we have at AWeber.
Supporting the Python Community and helping to further the efforts of the Community is in the best interest of AWeber and the Community overall. We also get to learn a great deal from the community in attendance. A win/win for sure.
Wingware (Gold)
Wingware doesn't just make a Python IDE. We also use Python and Wing IDE for everything we do, including developing the IDE with itself, running our website, and supporting our business processes. Back in 1998, Python was our inspiration to start the company, and it continues to be what makes Wingware possible. We've always been very interested in being a part of the Python community.
Sponsoring Python conferences is a great way for us to help Python programmers meet face to face to exchange ideas and learn from each other. We have been sponsoring PyCon in the US, and a number of the IPC conferences before that, since 2000 and we are now sponsoring many Python conferences around the world each year. In 2012 this included PyCon US, PyCon Taiwan, SciPy, PyOhio, EuroSciPy, Kiwi PyCon, PyCon Poland, PyCon France, PyTexas, PyCon UK, PyCon Ireland, PyCon Finland, PyArkansas, PyCon DE, and PyCon Argentina.
It is very exciting to see the growth of so many Python conferences in recent years, and we are very happy to be a part of that.
Revolution Systems (Gold)
We use Python for everything we do. Being Python and Django consultants, Python isn't just important to our business it is our
business.Sponsoring PyCon is both a way to help bolster the larger Python community and a great way to familiarize the Python elite with our companies services should they find a need for us. Having our staff attend is part educational, part networking, and a whole lot of fun. It's one of the few times a year we get together with people we work with regularly both professionally and on Open Source projects. PyCon 2011 in fact is where I met our most recent hire, with the recruiting process starting over a plate of ribs at Fat Matt's Rib Shack in Atlanta.
With all of these amazing sponsors, it's no surprise that sponsors from past PyCons are always welcome to speak up - I was very pleased to hear from Hilary Mason (Past PyCon Keynote, Data Scientist at Bitly) about why it meant a lot to them to sponsor PyCon in the past:
Bitly (Past Sponsor)
Bitly’s main github repo is 48.1% Python, our biggest language by far! The runner up, for the curious, is Javascript, and we even maintain just the teensiest bit of TCL code (1.2%, and yes, there’s a good story there). Python is important to us because the many available libraries allow us to develop features quickly and the ability to easily bind to C libraries gives us the performance we require to handle hundreds of millions of requests per day. Why does sponsoring/attending PyCon 2013 make sense for your organization?
We've sent speakers and attended over the last few years, and would like to continue to contribute to the python community. We publish lots of our code as open source (https://github.com/bitly / http://word.bitly.com/), and also find PyCon to be a great place to meet like-minded hackers working on interesting problems (p.s. [we're hiring!])
We have a nifty search experiment up at http://rt.ly and we’ve gotten a fantastic response to our intern Justin’s summer project, dablooms: https://github.com/bitly/dablooms.
In closing
I love seeing things like this from the companies that gain so much from the community - but also give back. I'm personally grateful for each and every one of them.
Of course; we're always looking for more sponsors - we need more to continue to grow, keep tickets low and offer exposure for these awesome sponsors to the community as a whole. We offer 50% discounts on Gold and Silver level sponsorship for companies under 25 employees just so we can provide exposure to companies just starting out. We've added workshops for sponsors - 1.5 hour tutorials that will be free for attendees to attend. We've added open space branding and coffee break options as well.
We go out of our way to be flexible with each and every sponsors - from customizing packages to setting specific billing/invoicing dates that work for their budgets and needs.
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