Hi Patrick, This has been discussed a bit on the board list and with LF. In the previous CLT we discussed that we would be making a call mid next week based on the development and registration numbers. We have a meeting to sync up with the LF on Monday. -- Mike Perez He/Him Ceph Community Manager M: +1-951-572-2633 494C 5D25 2968 D361 65FB 3829 94BC D781 ADA8 8AEA @Thingee  Thingee On Jan 31, 2020, 9:36 PM +0100, Patrick Donnelly <pdonnell@redhat.com>, wrote:

I don't know if this has been discussed yet but I think we need to start.

It's very likely all Chinese speakers and attendees will not be able to attend Cephalocon. Further, it seems likely that many attendees/speakers from outside the APAC region won't be permitted to go either. Red Hat has just issued an advisory that travel to the entire APAC region is only permitted in special circumstances. Based on historical trends for this type of virus, it's likely to take a few months to calm down and therefore that restriction will remain in place for at least 1-2 months.

So... I don't want to be an alarmist but it seems very likely we'll have low attendance. What should we do? Is it possible to cancel this close to the conference dates? Issue a survey seeking who still plans to go?

[Note: I was not planning on going to Cephalocon because I'll be on paternity leave. I don't have a horse in this race but certainly don't want everyone to get sick or have a lousy time!]

-- Patrick Donnelly, Ph.D. He / Him / His Senior Software Engineer Red Hat Sunnyvale, CA GPG: 19F28A586F808C2402351B93C3301A3E258DD79D _______________________________________________ Cephalocon-seoul-2020-pc mailing list -- cephalocon-seoul-2020-pc@ceph.io To unsubscribe send an email to cephalocon-seoul-2020-pc-leave@ceph.io

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)