Welcome to the directors desk! This is a more informal series of posts written predominantly by PyCon AU 2026 conference director, Jack Skinner. These posts are intended to be a little off-the-cuff, a little behind the scenes, and a little long form essay. All in an effort to be more open and transparent about how we make decisions at PyCon AU, and to share what the team is focusing on over the next 11 months as we plan PyCon AU 2026.
You’ve probably seen the news, or perhaps saw the announcement on stage at the 2025 conference close. PyCon AU 2026 will run 26-30 August 2026 at the Sofitel Brisbane Central… in Brisbane!
This announcement was the culmination of almost 9+ months of effort. The original planning doc for 2026 was penned as a 3 pager ‘pitch’ back in October 2024. With that much lead time, we had a vision to select the right location for a PyCon AU, not just find an acceptable place proximate to the organisers. Historically, PyCon AU organisers would be driven by an enthusiasm to bring Pycon AU to their city, but the online times and recent years have shown how a mostly-remote team can run perfectly cromulent PyCon’s AU.
In more ways than one, our vision for 2026 was to break the short cycle of recent years and do things a little different.
“But Jack”, I heard people exclaim, “Don’t you live in Sydney!?”
Indeed, most folks thought I was about to announce a Sydney venue. We had in fact considered several Sydney locations, along with Melbourne, Brisbane and potentially even Canberra.
However a given city, even Sydney or Brisbane, was never our specific goal.
Finding a venue
Instead of committing to a city and finding a venue, we took the opposite approach. Define what we need (and want) in a venue, and go out to market to discover the right location.
We evaluated 17+ locations up and down the east coast of Australia. The vast majority of attendees at PyCon AU travel domestically from the ‘eastern triangle’, and travel costs form a significant portion of the expenses to attend.
One of our core tenets of PyCon AU 2026 is access/affordability & sustainability.
There are surprisingly few venues that can accommodate a ‘small but wide’ conference format. I describe PyCon AU as a wide event, in that our concurrent programming forms a wide schedule. We run multiple concurrent tracks of approximately the same ‘size’, but we have a comparably small attendance - under 200 in each room and fewer than 600 attendees total in recent years. We also aspire to have multiple support rooms including organiser offices, AV rooms, speaker prep rooms, quiet spaces and so on. That means our overall footprint for the conference is quite a bit bigger than just the presentation spaces. Sponsors are increasingly expecting an on-site presence and that means paying for foyer/exhibition spaces as well.
Venue evaluations considered a broad array of criteria. Capacity, catering, equipment, facilities, floor plan/layout, foyer & exhibition space, public transport, accessibility, atmosphere/vibe and more. The spreadsheet we had for evaluation grew wider and taller with every passing week.
We eventually shortlisted 12 locations, and visited ~8 sites in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Having an open mind to the city allowed us to focus on the attendee experience and the operational complexity of each venue.
And I mean it - we conducted several site visits and inspected rooms inside and out. Walked several tens-of-thousands of steps through convention centers, hotel hallways, and even inspected hotel rooms to evaluate options. We did so with a ‘secret shopper’ mindset - staying at several potential venues and nearby hotels (that attendees were likely to choose) to get the inside experience.
In the end, we shortlisted two venues, coincidentally both in Brisbane. Ultimately, the Sofitel Brisbane Central was the right balance of physical conference space, available dates & city location for a PyCon AU.
With the support of a city
Finding the right physical venue was only half the vision for PyCon AU 2026. Part of the criteria above was proximity to other transport and services that attendees commonly enjoy.
Affordable transport options make access to the conference easier for everyone. Proximity to restaurants and bars make socialising easier every day. And having a lively city location means the community is more likely to travel before, and after and enjoy the ‘shoulder days’ of attending a conference.
We’ve been in touch with Brisbane City Council from day one, and we’re excited for the various programs and benefits we’ll be able to offer to PyCon AU 2026 attendees next year. The council’s subsidiary ‘Brisbane Economic Development Agency’ is specifically focused on soliciting and supporting large scale events to select Brisbane as a host city.
While we’re still very early in the planning stages, we’re expecting it to look like packaged pricing, discounts and simplified conference & travel experiences for all delegates (speakers, attendees, sponsors etc). I cannot wait to share more on this front… soon!
When to run a PyCon AU
Scheduling a PyCon AU is like playing three dimensional chess with a pigeon. You can find the perfect city, and venue, and settle on a date. And the pigeon will still make a mess of the board and tell you the conference clashes with something you hadn’t accounted for.
To start with, several venues told us in February that they were almost completely booked for 2026 and “did we have target dates for 2027 yet?”. So 18 months to plan a PyCon AU was already a bit of a signal for how far ahead we needed to be thinking!
Typically, PyCon AU runs in the second half of the calendar year. Too close to 1 July and sponsors haven’t finalised their marketing budgets to commit to the conference. Too close to the end of the year and its office party season. October marks the HSC period for teachers and any parents with teenagers. And the school holidays prior to that make travel expensive and difficult.
And as a conference we serve a broad range of industries and specialty areas, and each niche has its own events, meetups, conferences, camps and days. We also keep in touch with our kiwi friends across the Tasman, since they’ve run in August or September in previous years too. All of these communities and events tend to change dates, but I tend to keep an eye on about 6 or 7 headline events. For example, even if our attendees aren’t typically attending a .NET conference, our sponsors usually have a quarterly budget allocated to ‘community’ events and being aware of various industry activities help us avoid staffing conflicts so sponsors can support both events… so long as they don’t run at the same time!
Oh, and in Brisbane we must contend with the Ekka (formally the Royal Queensland Show), which means some venue options aren’t available for the entirety of August.
We finally landed on two date options: end of November (right as the heat in Brisbane really hits its stride)… or a delightful spring day at the end of August.
Well, friends, you can probably see that the decision appeared to have been made for us before it was even properly presented as a predicament.
So there you have it folks. We first started evaluating venues in January 2025… and we signed the final contract in September - 8 months later. A timeline that was a lot longer than we expected, but not all that surprising in hindsight given we’d been organising two conferences at once!