From the very first EuRuKo 2013 organisers’ meetup we decided that whatever we were about to do should positively impact the Ruby community. Aside from agreeing that we wanted EuRuKo 2013 to be an amazing conference, we also promised ourselves that even if it didn’t turn out to match our lofty expectations, the community should at least gain something significant.

As it happens, sometimes such decisions become a tall order when you try to make everything perfect.

Each of us, in the EuRuKo 2013 committee, spends many hours and even man-days every week in order to analyse and execute our weekly tasks. We are nine people on this committee whose input amounts for many man-days of effort every month. None of us has ever done something like EuRuKo before (not even remotely close), hence we are figuring it out as we go along. We have hired event management professionals to assist us, yet we are involved in every little detail of this conference –even to the point of exhaustion sometimes.

We started working on EuRuko 2013 immediately after Athens won the nomination for EuRuKo 2013 in the summer of 2012. Starting from last September, we meet every Wednesday and sometimes Fridays and weekends in order to review, design, allocate and decide on tasks. Since the summer of 2012, team members engage daily in various activities so that progress is made week after week. For example, during the weekends of October and November we were surveying all the top venues in Athens. At other times, members of the team had to skip work to deal with governmental bureaucracy in order found our non-profit company (which we needed in order to deal with suppliers, sponsors etc).

It sounds scary, but at the beginning we didn’t even know how to approach our weekly task allocation, never mind completing them. Alas, we made many mistakes, even to the point of break-up sometimes. However, we persisted and have now discovered our rhythm and every day we are more confident that we are on the right track.

Naturally, in numerous occasions, we have asked ourselves what others did before us in order to make EuRuko happen and how problems similar to ours were dealt with. Unfortunately, so many times we have not found adequate answers. This situation made us decide that our hard work should be (re-)used to educate others.

Consequently, we decided it was not only a good idea, but also our duty to publicly release all EuRuKo conference “execution material”.

In the hope that subsequent EuRuKos build on our effort and improve on our mistakes and successes we will release, upon the completion of the conference on the 29th of June 2013, all of our documentation, private discussions, decisions, spreadsheets, meeting minutes, supplier contracts, budgets and everything else conference-related that we can think of. This will be our contribution to the community.

We love learning, experimenting and sharing knowledge because above all we believe we can improve our world. We hope that the honour, which the Ruby community has bestowed upon this unfairly tarnished part of our globe, can be turned into tangible benefits for everyone inside and outside of the Ruby community! So, thank you for your trust and please accept our contribution, it is coming soon…