Voxxed Thessaloniki is changing

No Voxxed Thessaloniki 2019 – Why?

You have probably noticed that there were no announcements for Voxxed Days Thessaloniki 2019 and the reason is pretty much simple. We are not doing any event in 2019. But why? Does this mean you had enough of it?

Obviously not! We decided to change a lot. Voxxed Thessaloniki started in 2016 mid October and the next two years it took place the last weekend of November. Running the event during this period had a few drawbacks.

  • There are too many conferences ran at the same time of the year which was adding one more obstacle to find top-tier speakers.
  • Most of the airlines reduce their operating flights by the end of September so it was really hard to find affordable ticket prices for speakers coming from abroad.
  • Furthermore during the last week of November is one of the biggest holidays in the US (Thanksgiving Day) and several US-based speakers were declining our invitation due to this fact
  • Finally the weather. Although we never had issues with the weather, November is not the best time of the year to travel in Thessaloniki, Greece.

So we made a brave decision. We decided to skip 2019 and come back in April 3rd and 4th, 2020! Yes! Spring is much better in Greece and April is not so packed with conferences.

We are becoming an eco-friendly conference

We acknowledge every single feedback we receive from our attendees and we try to improve ourselves every year. This time we are changing a lot regarding our organisation in order to make Voxxed Days Thessaloniki 2020 an eco-friendly event.According to MeetGreen’s research, the average conference attendee produces over 170 kilograms of CO2 emissions per day. A three-day conference for 1000 people creates 5670 kilograms of waste, over half of which will go directly to landfill. We are not that big but we believe that even small actions can make an impact.

Here’s a list of the things we plan to do :

  • No printed schedule. Last year we evaluated a mobile app mainly for the schedule feature and we received super positive feedback. Therefore we decided that the mobile app is more than enough and we don’t need to keep printed schedule anymore
  • No more plastic or paper in swags and bags. We made a start last year by giving away a re-usable coffee cup and we will continue this tradition again. Our bags will be also made from a reusable material and we will not allow in them anything made of paper.
  • No more waste on bags or swags. Every year we order our swags and bags a month before the conference by guest-imating the number of total attendees. Unfortunately, we have noticed that we always order mode than we need – because it’s hard to predict the future so we decided to make a small change. We will order bags and swags only for the attendees who will register before a given date (March the 1st most probably). This will allow us to make a zero-waste order
  • Eco-friendly flights. Although some times these flights are a bit more expensive we will make our best to pick eco-friendly flight tickets for our speakers.
  • Recycling. Even though all the above actions will reduce the amount of waste, we will work together with a recycling company to make sure that all re-usable materials will not just be thrown as waste.

How this is affecting our attendees?

For sure you will feel more proud of attending a conference with a zero-waste mindset! Apart from that you need to pay attention to something we are changing in our ticket schemes.

The good news is that the ticket prices remain the same! Yay!

The “bad” news is that if you are a late-bird buyer you will miss our amazing swags and probably our t-shirts. We will have a hard deadline of the standard tickets around a month before the conference for the reasons we described above. But don’t worry we plan to announce our speakers early enough to  give our attendees enough time to buy their ticket on-time

Excited for Voxxed Thessaloniki 2020

One last thing! Every year we are inviting top-tier speakers and we will keep doing it for the years to come. We have adjusted our list of tracks to include more geeky and technical talks and we can’t wait to evaluate the speaker’s submissions! This year expect a perfect mix of international speakers, local rising stars and seasoned advocates from major IT companies who will discuss the latest trends in several technological fields

About the author

Patroklos Papapetrou is a Java architect, addicted to software quality and an agile team leader with more than 15 years of experience in software development. He believes and invests in people and team spirit seeking quality excellence. He’s one of the authors of SonarQube in action book, he is an active SonarQube community member and plugin contributor. He treats software systems as flowers that’s why he prefers calling himself a software gardener.