If you have ever been to PyCon, you have met volunteers from the On-site Committee: they give out badges, open the doors to the conference and help you to figure out where to go. We spoke to Kristian Rother, a member of the On-site Committee, about what it takes to run the conference.

What is the On-site Committee's purpose? What are the main goals?

KR: We are currently recruiting a team of between 25 and 40 volunteers who will be present at the conference, mainly to staff the sessions. During the last year in Berlin, one of the very important purposes of the volunteers was to make sure that the doors were closed and that everybody was seated and nobody was standing, because that was a strict safety requirement by the venue. The volunteers also hand out the wristbands for the tutorials and check them at the entrance. They staff the registration desk, and we usually have a couple of people available for tasks that come up whenever a helping person is needed. The work of the On-site Committee is vital to the conference: we wouldn’t be able to run the conference without a team that takes care of the badges and seating.

Who is normally coming as the volunteers? How would you describe the crowd?

KR: It is a diverse crowd of professionals, students, and everyone from the Python community. I think it makes a difference when everybody involved is part of the community, that they know what conference they are actually at and are excited to be there. We're trying to get a mixture of experienced community members and new people. This allows us to run the conference smoothly but also welcome new people.

What does a typical working day of a volunteer look like? When do they start? When do they finish?

KR: This is up to the volunteers themselves. The deal that we offer them is that they sign up for nine or ten hours of sessions, which means that they have about two days of the conference where they can do whatever they want.

Once the program is out, we create a big spreadsheet with all the session slots. We ask volunteers to self-assign themselves so they can take a careful look at the program and decide which sessions they want to attend and which are not so important so they could sign up for volunteer duty during those times.

What works for some volunteers really well is to help with setting up the registration desk a day earlier; others prefer to stay at the end and help a bit with the cleanup. Some choose to be there when the conference opens, even though this is the toughest job. We have hundreds of people coming in within half an hour.

What do you like about being a volunteer?

KR: When you're staffing the registration desk and there's nothing really going on, you basically get to talk to random people a lot. The same is true for the volunteers who are guarding the doors — we had very deep conversations about projects that I otherwise would not have had. That's also one reason for me to attend the conference, that you get to know how different people use Python.

I assume it's similar for both experienced and new people. If you're new to programming and it's your first conference, it's sometimes quite hard when you get stuck. Then when you hear someone else who is basically feeling the same, I think that's quite an important thing to find out in a learning journey.

You can still join the Onsite team. Check out the call for volunteers here: https://2025.pycon.de/blog/call-for-volunteers/