This is the 2018 version of a web application for managing ticket sales, attendee preferences, the CFP, grant applications, and other aspects of PyCon UK.

The 2017 version is here.

This is a standard Django project, and is tested and (will be) deployed with Python 3.6. Dependencies can be installed with pip install -r requirements.txt. A local server can be started with ./manage.py runserver, and tests can be run with ./manage.py test.

To run locally, you will need to create a file called .env. You can copy .env.example to .env, which will be enough to run the tests. To interact with Stripe, you will need some test API keys. Ask @inglesp if you would like to use the test API keys for the PyCon UK account.

You will also need to have a Postgres database called ironcage.

Bug reports are welcome: please open an issue. We're particularly interested in usability issues.

There may also be some open issues: if they are unclaimed you are welcome to attempt to fix them. However, please do not open a pull request without first discussing it with the team via the issue tracker.

We would be happy to offer assistance to newer coders (and particularly to members of the UK Python community).

See CONTRIBUTORS.md for a list of contributors.

TODO

We are aware of a number of other projects for managing conferences. However, they are either too opinionated about how a conference should be organised, in which case they would overly constrain how we run PyCon UK, or else they attempt to be a framework for building conference management systems, in which case we risk spending excessive time understanding and fighting a framework.

The name comes from Weber's Iron Cage of Bureacracy, and @inglesp liked the sound of a system that "traps individuals in systems based purely on teleological efficiency, rational calculation and control"! (He now thinks that sounds a bit pretentious.)