This year we are introducing a few changes, we hope for the better, in order to address feedback from the participants from previous years, solving some problems we’ve also encountered. We’d like you to take a couple of minutes to understand what, and why, we are changing.

The biggest complaint we had in previous years, specially in 2015, was the fact that one of the rooms was too small (around 50 places), and we could see that the room ended up being packed most of the time, with a lot of people on the outside trying to take a peek. This led us to change venue this year, with the support from Microsoft, to a new venue where we’ll be able to have roughly the same number of people in each room, for a total of around 300 people. Additionally, this change also puts us in one of the most beautiful areas in Lisbon, in Parque das Nações, and allows us to have space for workshops and networking.

The other most common complaint we had was the lack of tickets. Adding to that, we’ve seen that only roughly 70% of a total of 250 registered participants (i.e., people which had booked a ticket) actually showed up, meaning roughly 80 places were never taken, although they were reserved. On the other hand we had a waitlist of over 100 people, some of which would probably be able to attend, but didn’t get a ticket.
We don’t think this is fair, so we had to come up with some way to make sure people who really want to attend are able to, and make this more balanced and fair for everyone.
To this end, this year we will be charging a very small fee of €5 for the tickets. Before you get mad at us, let us tell you that you’ll get some stuff in return

• There will be lunch for everyone (another, oddly, common complaint for previously free tickets…);
• There will be a tshirt for everyone attending;
• There will be stickers for everyone attending;
• …and possibly other goodies (all money goes into the conference, as you may already know)

We hope that with this change we can accomplish two things, make sure that as many interested participants as possible actually book tickets, and that you get something back from your money. We also hope that everyone in the community who is really interested in the conference understands why we had to do this.
As usual, we are open to your feedback on how we can improve the conference in the future.

Register Here…