Re: [draft] Cancel this year's in-person Debian Developers Conference DebConf20
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Hi zobel
On 2020/05/22 14:40, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> This is a draft for a GR I would like to propose.
<snip>
I can't block you from doing a GR (and I certainly wouldn't want to!),
but I'd like you to consider the variables and consequences one last
time before posting such a GR.
First, the Isreal local team are made up of highly competent Debian
members. I trust them, and believe that they are able to make a good
decision based on the available information. Yesterday in the DC20
announcement, they made it clear that they're putting feelers out there
to gauge how many people feel confident that they'd actually be
attending in person. As far as I understand, they intend to make a final
decision on whether (or to which extent) DC20 will be an in-person event
in about two weeks from now. I believe that this GR is putting the cart
before the horse, and while I 100% understand (and to large extents
agree) with its content, I do think that the DC team will end up making
a good decision and that using such a GR to take that decision away from
will just cause unnecessary anguish.
Secondly, so far this month they're infection rate has been really low.
Low enough so that they can still effectively do contact tracing and
cluster control (which is basically a lost cause in most countries at
the moment). They have a very good chance of having this virus under
control very soon. There are other countries that are doing well too,
for example New Zealand who are in the single digits with new
infections, and China, which was the original epicenter, has learned to
deal with this virus quite well too. I acknowledge that it's too soon to
tell, but there is still a possibility that at least people from
countries like that might be able to travel, and maybe DC20 ends up
being really small, maybe just a few dozen people in person with mostly
locals, but is that so bad? We're planning an online minidebconf for the
end of the month, there might be another before DC20 is supposed to
happen. This gives us a good oppertunity to hammer away at our online
participation tools so that those who can't or do not wish to travel can
still participate remotes. And I realise that this experience will never
be the 1st class experience that a full in-person DebConf is, but at
least we can have some form of annual event together, and forcing us to
improve remote participation will help future DebConfs be better like
that. It's currently a sore issue and more and more people choose not to
travel for environmental reasons, so it's something we'll have to be
better at in the future.
*Phew*, I'm just going to take a breath and say sorry for all the text
so far... but there's more...
Thirdly, if the specific event is totally cancelled, do you feel that
the DC20 team should just lose their slot? Even if you move it to next
year, the situation might still be somewhat similar to this year by then
(and besides, the India team has already won for next year). If they get
postponed (to 2022) instead of cancelled, do you realise that the
political debates surrounding a DebConf in Israel will start afresh and
that many people really don't want to be dragged through that again?
I want to state again that I 100% agree with your sentiment regarding
physical meetings, but DC20 was initially planned before the epidemic
started. If they can manage to do a nano-scale DebConf and do it safely,
why not let them? Or if they decide to let them do it online only, let
it be their choice and responsibility to make. I think the chances of
people from Africa, Europe, India, South America or North America being
able to travel to Israel before the end of the year is super slim
anyway, so I'd ask you to reconsider this GR and at least see what the
DebConf team comes up with first.
If they manage to either figure out the details to do either a tiny
scale DebConf or an online DebConf, then we might still preserve most of
the secured sponsorship, enjoy some level of interaction and problem
solving online, and be able to wrap up DebConf in Israel this year and
start to worry about the situation in India instead.
So again, I'd ask you to consider the above at least one more time
before posting that GR.
- -Jonathan
- --
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Debian, the universal operating system.
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