How are event companies dealing with the coronavirus strain?
Ministry of Testing runs a lot of events, we have one in Brighton coming up at the end of March. It is still going ahead, unless something significant changes. We will be keeping an eye on WHO and government guidelines. A few people are unable to attend due to company travel ban policies, but the majority are still currently down to attend.
I'm attending Business of Software in Cambridge (UK) later this month too. I messaged them to confirm that it is still going ahead. It is.
@tylertringas is still going ahead with his Founder Summit event in Mexico.
Here are some things I've taken note of:
- people are keeping a close watch on the situation
- are being mindful and considerate
- many of these events are small in comparison, say 100 - 400 people. Public locations easily gather many more
- The World Health Organisation advice is that even international travel bans focused on specific infected areas have little impact on the spread of such things and often, the economic effects of these are much worse.
- the economic impact to businesses not carrying on with events where possible can be much worse
- event organisers aim to keep everyone in the loop in the run up to events
- back up plans are being considered to take the events online, or cater for speakers who may not be able to attend.
- there's all kinds of excitement for people who run online meetup tools.
Anyone else have insights or experiences to share?
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I'm in east Asia (and was during SARS, too). I think it's unbelievably irresponsible to be running a large conference now.
SXSW is a particularly egregious example. Last year they had half a million attendees. Thousands will be going from California (currently with a declared state of emergency, and an active outbreak) to Texas where there is no outbreak (yet). This could very easily both cost thousands of lives relatively directly and spread the outbreak to the rest of the US and other countries people are flying in from.
Another thing I'd point out is that the WHO's handling of this has been incredibly damaging and corrupt.
This includes:
Update: Thanks to the efforts of Tim Ferriss and others, SXSW has been cancelled. The organizers really weren't interested in doing the right thing but at least for this one major conference, things have taken a humane turn.
I'll be at Founder Summit next week!
Perhaps doing elbow bumps instead of handshakes 🙅♂️
Ah, now I have fomo. Though I got an elbow bump fix at my IH meetup last night.
Mexico only has 2 confirmed cases and California is already under a state of emergency, as I suspect you've heard. Not only is there an outbreak in California, but very few people are being tested and asymptomatic people can be contagious.
Are you really sure you need to risk it?
If you do, I strongly encourage you to wear a mask at all times while in public (for their safety). This is the same thing I'm doing in Taiwan (as per CDC guidelines), having arrived from Japan in the past 14 days. I was in Okinawa, where there have been three confirmed cases to date (less than Northern California).
😂🔥
Not an event company. We were planning to host our first conference Product Impact 2020 on April 01, 2020. We ended up canceling since NYC officials have stated: "it will only get worse". My reasoning in detail: https://theproductangle.com/canceling-product-impact-2020/
I'd imagine this one is considering a rebrand https://www.contagious.com/events
Hah, so funny. I wouldn’t want to be them right now!
A bunch of live events are switching to an online version via https://hopin.to/ -- it has some fundamentally important features like being able to pair off the audience to chat with each other, allows for small group discussions/exercises during a talk, audience-to-audience "networking" sessions, and has a bunch of other nice stuff to move it a bit further away from "webinar" and toward "event".
This. I never understood why more conferences and events are not done this way.
It would be cheaper and more convenient for 99% of people.
There are obviously drawbacks, but maybe it's time to test out making "online" conference?
And in terms of overall perspective, I'm still going to local events with (mostly) local attendees, but I won't travel for them and won't attend "big" local events that many other people have travelled to.