Attending a conference is an exciting and valuable way to get involved with a community. It provides delegates with an opportunity to spend time with their peers in a setting that allows the sharing of ideas, and exposes people to opportunities and challenges that they may not otherwise get to see. And above all else, it offers an opportunity to relax with and enjoy the company of the wonderful people in our community!

Unfortunately, many members of our community are unable to take advantage of this kind of opportunity for financial reasons. Attending a conference is expensive, both in terms of explicit financial costs like ticket prices and travel, but also in terms of implicit costs like loss of time or the need to find childcare.

These limitations mean that our community is unevenly exposed to the benefits of conference attendance. This limits us: as long as only a subset of our community are able to attend, we will be missing important perspectives that make our events and lives richer.

For this reason, PyCon UK believes it is extremely important to enable as many people as possible to attend. To this end, we are offering extensive assistance in the form of grants and subsidised tickets. The goal of this program is to enable people to attend who would like to, but cannot bear the financial burden of attending.

Going hand-in-hand with the financial assistance process is another core tenet of PyCon UK: everybody pays. This applies truly to everyone: by default, PyCon UK asks that everybody buys a ticket, including the PyCon UK Committee, all speakers, and all volunteers. This system allows us to support our substantial financial assistance process, and ensures that discounted admission is not granted to those who do not need it.

This means that it is extremely important that attendees are proactive about applying for financial assistance. If the only reason you are not attending is that you cannot afford to do so, then please apply for financial assistance. You can find instructions for doing so here.