On 2020-01-31T12:35:25, Patrick Donnelly <pdonnell@redhat.com> wrote: Hi Patrick, as Mike said, we're hoping to have a wee bit more clarity in the next week, maximum two. But:
go either. Red Hat has just issued an advisory that travel to the entire APAC region is only permitted in special circumstances.
That's obviously also concerning. If RH were to pull out or downgrade attendance, that'd also undermine the point of the event. I share your concerns overall. I think at this point, we've got a 50:50 chance to have the event we wanted, especially if our esteemed attendees, colleagues and sponsors from China cannot join. But the cancellation fees for everything combined also are a huge hit. Unless we can turn "cancellation penalty" into a much lower rescheduling fee, at least ... In my assessment, it's unlikely we'd be able to pull together another major event this year. Even if we end up at 50% of the planned attendee rate, it might make sense to go ahead with the event and avoid the sunk cost being entirely wasted. If we go ahead (meaning: the risk assessment works out, of course), we should however investigate good live streaming, recordings, and being able to take (curated) questions/feedback from a remote audience (Twitter hashtag, etc). If we don't go ahead, we may want to consider if we have any way of recording the intended talks in acceptable quality remotely and turning it into a YouTube-fest, and scheduling Q&A sessions in some sensible form. (Which, incidentally, while not as great as dining out in Seoul, would be good for our environmental impact ...) And, at least, we can blame the low attendance on force majeure and not on being ridiculously late with announcing and scheduling everything, ahem ;-) TL;DR: at this point, I'd personally consider going ahead until the impact on SK becomes more clear, but we do have options. Regards, Lars -- Architect SDS, Distinguished Engineer SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, MD: Felix Imendörffer, HRB 36809 (AG Nürnberg) "Architects should open possibilities and not determine everything." (Ueli Zbinden)