Re: DebConf20 registration is now open (with caveats)
Giovanni Mascellani dijo [Fri, May 22, 2020 at 03:51:09PM +0200]: > (...) (Not specifically answering to Gio, but to the thread as a whole) > (...) But meetings should remain as small as possible, and as > geographically confined as possible. Organizing conferences with > hundreds of people coming from all over the world is, in my opinion, > irresponsible: There's also the issue of getting there --- Most people travelling to Israel will have to switch airplanes at an intermediate airport. Big airports simply is something that scares me currently. People comng from all different origins into a single space. In any case, a DebConf20 in August would surely not gather the usual hundreds of people, but only some dozens. > I am sorry for the organizing team, who for sure has poured a lot of > energy and dedication into DebConf20. They deserve all our gratitude and > they have all mine. I know it is disappointing to see their efforts > wasted, but in the current situation I don't think it is responsible to > physically meet from all over the world. It's not just about the risk > each individual attendee would accept to take: it's the risk our whole > communities take (particularly the vulnerable ones, from the health > viewpoint) when individuals allow the virus to spread. > > I hope that Debian does not organize any non-local physical meeting this > year, although I am sad this has to happen. I completely concur with what you and others have said. I don't think it's in any way responsible to hold a presential conference in the planned dates. I am happy to read in this thread that the local team does not cling to the idea of hosting the conference in August; lets see how life unfolds for the next ... months? Note that we have *not* come to an official statement yet, but I'm sure this thread has given a valuable insight on the feling of the community. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: DebConf20 registration is now open (with caveats)
On 2020-05-23 05:46 +0800, Andrew Lee wrote: > As crisis is turning point. According to everyone's feedback. I also believe > to > have the conference in person is not the best option to fight together to the > virus. And I also don't want our DebConf orga team's efforts to be wasted. > > I believe orga team has done their best. We hope we all may work together to > make this year as the first special DebConf ever with revolutionary > arrangement > (online, VR/XR...etc) possible. Large in-person conferences are not just a problem because of the disease risk, but also because they are very high-carbon activities that are increasingly difficult to justify. Lots of organisations have discovered that they can do their meet-ups remotely recently, and I think we should take this opportunity to see if we can too. We should be better at this than most. Experience in other organisations is that all-remote events (i.e. where everyone is remote on the same footing) work a lot better than mixed events where some people are remote and some are there in-person. Obviously events where everyone are in-person work even better, but that's clearly not going to happen this year however things go, and has never been true anyway. So I vote for working on a fully-remote conference this year, if only by way of a trial-run. If it works reasonably well then maybe in future we could have a full in-person conference every 3 or 4 years or so, with remote ones being the annual norm (it would be a hell of a lot easier to organise if nothing else). I realise that's pretty radical, but events like debconf are a significant part of the excessive emissions of many of us, and 2020 is clearly a year for a rethink of many things. Lets not waste the opportunity to rethink debconf. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: DebConf20 registration is now open (with caveats)
On 5/22/20 11:11 AM, Holger Levsen wrote: > On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 12:00:37AM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote: >> I believe it's important to get those numbers somehow. Now, the >> registration interface does not provide for anything like that - we >> were preparing a survey in the last couple of days to get a better >> look at said numbers, and we should be sending it out to everybody >> soon; it will be important in the decision process. > > I believe the poll being prepared misses a "we're in a global pandemic, please > cancel this event" option. > > I also believe organizing DebConf as an in person event in August 2020 > is endangering the participants *and* others, and if GRs were not > such a pain (and a big hammer) I were pondering to have one for not > organizing this in Debian's name. > > I'm sorry but this is how I see things currently. +1 I can't help to think about a disaster scenario where 100s of DDs attend the event, get sick, some percents get in life danger, and another percent dies... Cheers, Thomas Goirand (zigo)
