Hi Stefano, I appreciate you taking the time to lay out the thought process. Even though this is indeed now academic, since there is no decision we will actually be disputing with a GR, I want to reply to one particular subpoint to make it clear exactly where I'm coming from. On Wed, Jun 03, 2020 at 06:39:53PM +0000, Stefano Rivera wrote: > Would it be totally unrealistic, and unsafe to bring a large number of > people together? Probably, yes. But if the local authorities are saying > you can, it's worth considering. This is the part that I categorically disagree with. Even assuming baseline competence of the local authorities (which, given that they're not in the US, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt), this only speaks to the authorities' confidence in their ability to prevent a SARS-CoV-2-positive attendee from causing a LOCAL outbreak that is a threat to public health. It says NOTHING about the risk of someone contracting COVID in their home country, arriving asymptomatic at the conference, being contagious and transmitting it, and sending the virus home to a dozen other countries to incubate for a week after the conference before the nature of the problem has become clear. If that happened, it would be entirely on the organizers (i.e. Debian), and not on the local authorities, because we were inducing people to travel internationally for the event. And if the conference were to manage this risk by imposing broad restrictions on countries of origin of physical attendees, then it shouldn't carry the DebConf name; it should be treated as a miniconf instead, due to the impact it would have on accessibility to the developer community to have an even smaller than usual subset of developers attending in person with most attending remotely. Cheers, -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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