Seat Reservations for Tutorials at the Venue

Space is limited unfortunately.

TLDR;

• You will need a wristband to gain access to the tutorials.
• There are three stations at the venue where you can pick up these wristbands.
• Each participant can pick up two wristbands in total until Monday. The real demand is hard to predict upfront: the organizers will monitor and the number might increase
• Wristband wearers need to enter the tutorial room up to five minutes before the tutorial starts. At that time, any remaining seats are available to anyone.

Background

At our last conference in 2019, more people wanted to attend the tutorials than we had seats to offer, and the rooms were overcrowded. This year we want to introduce a new approach to distribute tutorial seats fairly across all attendees interested in attending tutorials without queuing at the rooms, or overcrowding.

Seat Distribution

There are 17 tutorials with 112 seats available each, in total we have 1904 seats available.

To access a specific tutorial, a wristband for that tutorial is required. For example if you want to attend the refactoring tutorial, you need to present a wristband for the refactoring tutorial. Wristbands are only valid for one particular tutorial.

How to Get the Wristbands / Reserve a Seat for a Tutorial

~We have three stations across the venue where you can pick up the required wristbands.~

Update Please come by the registration to pick up the required wristbands.

Some tutorials are more in demand than others, that’s why each station will offer different tutorials distributing the higher-in-demand tutorials across the venue. We distributed this based on ​​community votes received and our experience from previous years.

Pick-Up stations

We will add soon:

• The locations of the pick-up stations in the venue
• Which stations will offer which tutorials
• Pick-up station opening times
• Pick-up will be available Sunday during early badge pick-up

Attending Tutorials

Tutorials are expected to become crowded. Therefore we would like to ask everyone:

• Please be at the tutorial room 10-15 minutes before the tutorial starts
• Please seat in a fashion others can join in easily avoiding empty seats in between
• Please keep in mind everyone must be seated on a chair. According to the Veranstaltungsordnung neither we nor the venue may allow standing or sitting on the floor.
• There are power outlets available in each tutorial room, please be mindful and share the charging capacity with others in the room.
• Once the tutorial is finished everyone must leave the room, even if you have a wristband for the consecutive tutorial. Please leave the room in an orderly and effective fashion. If you’d like to keep chatting with the instructor(s) or with other attendees, please move the conversation to the area outside the tutorial rooms. This way the next instructor(s) can start preparing, and our volunteers can easily bring in the attendees for the next tutorial.

Please keep in mind:
Seats not taken five minutes before the tutorial will be considered available to anyone. If you arrive with a tutorial wristband five minutes or less before the tutorial and can’t get a seat, then you cannot participate. We ask you to leave the room quietly and let the attendees respect those that arrived on time and followed these guidelines. Maybe try another tutorial?

Wristbands are not personalized

If you want to change which tutorial you go to, feel free to exchange and trade tutorial wristbands with other attendees at the conference. You can also return to the stations for exchanges, pending availability.

Footnote

Originally - already for the 2020 conference - we planned to collect participants' preferences for the tutorials in advance, and allocate the places in advance. Unfortunately, we were not able to do this as planned 😞. Instead, we are trying a new approach that we hope will work better than 2019 🤞. We hope you will like it, and we look forward to your feedback. Let us know what worked well, and what could be improved next time.