Thank you Moritz, I appreciate it.
I hope we do!
Cheers,
Jon
On 5/30/2020 4:16 AM, Moritz Lennert wrote:
Hi Jon,
All my sympathies go out to you and the team. You did an amazing job preparing
all this and I'm sure it would have been a wonderful event. I admire your
courage to do it in the first place, and to pull the plug which I agree is the
best solution in these uncertain times.
I hope we will have the opportunity to meet in Calgary some other time.
Moritz
Am 29. Mai 2020 17:34:11 MESZ schrieb Jon Neufeld :
Hi All,
As you know the Calgary LOC has made the decision to cancel FOSS4G 2020
due to the COVID19 pandemic.
I have posted the rationale for our decision here
https://www.jonathanneufeld.com/the-rationale-for-canceling-a-global-event/
and have included it below as well.
TL;DR Trying to host a major international event during a pandemic
carried huge financial and reputational risks and we decided the safest
thing was to cancel.
Here is the full post:
===
As we recently shared on Twitter and the website, FOSS4G 2020 Calgary
has been canceled. Clearly this wasn’t the outcome we were hoping for
after working for nearly two-years to bring this event to Calgary, but
the reality of COVID-19 is that we likely won’t see large gatherings of
people in 2020.
Recently another chair of a regional FOSS4G event wrote asking about
our
decision to cancel and the reasoning behind it. In the spirit of
openness and an open community I thought I would share it here:
Hi, Thanks for your note, I’m happy to share our thinking on
canceling the event and hopefully it can help inform your decision.
Context: Fast facts about FOSS4G 2020
- Planning Time: 2 years (Oct 2018 to Aug 2020)
- Target Attendance: 1,200 to 1,500 people
--- Break even attendance: 800 people
- Total conference budget: $1M+
- Real Cost to Cancel: ~$60 CAD
We were well on our way to building a strong global FOSS4G event, we
had
sponsors lined up, a government grant for ~$100k, and 116 people had
already bought tickets. When COVID19 first hit we thought it would pass
reasonably quickly and that things would “return to normal” fairly
soon,
but as the travel bans came in to place and the government here
extended
bans on gatherings it was clear that we would either need to
dramatically scale-back FOSS4G or cancel it altogether. Since we are so
close to the USA we were expecting that a big portion of our attendees
would be Americans. For the first time in history the
longest-undefended
border in the world, the one between Canada and the USA is closed and
the USA has the highest Infection rate of any country on earth; they
aren’t getting that under control in the near future.
Keep in mind that we have already signed agreements with the largest
Convention Center in the city, and four major hotel chains. These
contracts all carry minimum cancellation amounts which ratchet up as
you
get closer to the event. If we cancel them sooner, we end up paying
less
, but if we cancel later the bill gets dramatically higher. When the
travel bans went into place the minimum payments added up to $250k CAD,
and if we waited to cancel the week before the event they were well
over
$500k!
The gamble then, was this: do we try and host an event with a reduced
scope and hope that we get enough attendees to at least break even,
where do we cancel it and hope we can get out of the minimum payments.
We figured that even if the borders opened and COVID-19 disappeared
right away that people’s travel habits would not go back to “normal”.
Companies have slashed their travel budgets, people would still be wary
about international travel and large gatherings, and the world would
not
return to a place where a global conference would work. Based on this
we
determined that we could not hold an event that would break even.
TECTERRA Inc, the company backing up and organizing FOSS4G this year,
is
a small nonprofit and we wouldn’t be able to sustain those kind of
losses. We also worried about the negative impact too reputation, both
the reputations of the event and of the organizers, if we held an
unsuccessful event.
All of this added together made it clear the only choice was to cancel
the 2020 event. We briefly discussed trying to push it to 2021, but
there were two things in the way. The Buenos Aires team was unwilling
to
move their event, and a 2021 event means our local organizing committee
would have spent three years working on a five-day event. To be clear,
I
don’t fault the 2021 BA team for holding fast, they have an LOC focused
on delivering an event at a specific time and I respect that.
So reluctantly we pulled the trigger and cancelled the event. We have
been fortunate that our venues and hotels were willing to work with us
and canceled the contracts without any further penalty. I don’t need
to
tell you how hard it is to cancel an event after putting in this much
work, and with your
