Insights 2020 - In Person or Online?

I don’t know of much that’s still happening. Everything from SXSW to March Madness has been cancelled.

:astonished: We were at Disney World in Florida 3 weeks ago. So thankful we got to go before this outbreak started in the US. That’s so sad. Well I bet Disney tickets are going really cheap now… :mouse::thinking:

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So just got the official email from Epicor…Here’s an excerpt
UPDATE: Epicor Insights and COVID-19

We understand there is concern around the current COVID-19 outbreak and how it may impact the upcoming Epicor Insights Customer Conference. We are actively monitoring the situation and following guidance provided by the CDC, World Health Organization and specific government guidelines by country.

At this time, Insights will take place as planned in Nashville on May 3-6. The health and safety of our attendees, speakers, and our sponsors is a top priority and as we will continue to monitor the situation as it evolves and provide updates if there’s any impact to the event. We look forward to having you join us in Nashville in May.

We know many of you are considering the appropriate measures to take within your own organizations and how to prepare yourself and your workforce for this outbreak. We encourage you to continue taking all precautionary steps to maintain your health.

If you have any additional questions, please feel free to reach out directly to insights@epicor.com

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The TED talk one was very good.

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FYI

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I’m kind of a stickler when it comes to data presentation …

The y-axis isn’t linear, nor is it logarithmic…

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Just read this interesting email from Brent Ozar:
I’ve had the unusual position of being a conference attendee, speaker, and sponsor, all at different times of my life, so I wanted to do a quick brain dump explaining some of the gotchas involved behind the scenes.

Canceling a conference can financially ruin the organizers. The organizers spend a ton of money leading up to the conference – doing marketing, paying staff salaries, paying deposits (event space, food, hotels, printers.) Some of this stuff may be refundable, but … a lot of it isn’t, like staff salaries and supplies that are already purchased. Organizers can buy insurance, but to save money, they often don’t buy insurance to cover this kind of thing, especially diseases. As a result, when they have to cancel an event, they can be financially destroyed instantly. The SxSW festival just canceled their event, laid off 1/3 of their staff, and is considering bankruptcy.

Who cancels the conference can make a big difference. If the government cancels all events, then it can be easier to get money back for hotels, flights, event spaces, and make insurance claims. As a result, organizers can be tempted to play a game of chicken with government, trying to see who cancels first.

People are getting infected at conferences. For example, two people at RSA’s conference got infected, and it just kinda makes sense: people are flying in from all over the world, spending time in close proximity with strangers in airplanes, eating food from buffets, and of course, shaking hands with each other because it’s just hard to break that habit. (I’m still laughing at the Dutch prime minister who, after announcing a no-shaking-hands rule, promptly shook hands to close the announcement.)

Speakers and volunteers have to deal with more people. People come up afterwards and ask questions in close proximity, they want to shake hands, take selfies, hug, you name it. We’re at higher risk for infection, plus we’re especially dangerous if we’re the infected ones, and we spread it rapidly to other people.

(Personally, I have asthma, which means that if somebody infects me, I’ve got a much harder time fighting off the infection.)

Attendees are sensitive to the situation, too. They’re often packed in elbow-to-elbow with complete strangers in varying degrees of health, all breathing on each other for hours on end. Once an attendee starts sneezing and coughing, other attendees will start to feel uncomfortable, leading to awkward situations. For example, plane passengers became disruptive when an attendee had an allergy attack, and another plane ran into even stranger issues.

Sooner or later, conference attendees will ask organizers to remove someone of questionable health. For that to work, we all need to be on the same page about what’s accepted behavior at events, and attendees need to be told long ahead of time that they shouldn’t show up if they have symptoms that even look related to COVID-19. Sure, I get it – you don’t think you’re infected – but that doesn’t mean other people are going to be comfortable with you coughing into your elbow every five minutes, and wiping your mouth on your shirt. Conference organizers likely aren’t going to be sanitizing chairs and tables between sessions.

Organizers are already stretched to their limits. Leading up to an event, the organizers and volunteers do a heroic amount of work just dealing with regular conference issues. The Center for Disease Control has a prep document for event organizers, but just looking at the tasks in that list, I can tell that it’d take multiple full time bodies to check off all those tasks – and events often just don’t have the spare staff available.

Vendor staff don’t want to get infected. Companies make decisions to sponsor or attend a conference, and then they send their sales & marketing teams to the conference as well. Those employees may not have had much of a choice about whether they wanted to attend – they may not have the passionate feelings that you have about attending a conference to learn, because they’re just there to do sales and network. Their families ask tough questions about, “Why exactly is your company sending you to this event? Can’t you sell things from home?”

Everyone’s less likely to attend events right now. Companies are setting no-travel policies to protect their staff, which means the conference has less attendees, speakers, and sponsor staff available to attend.

When you add all this up, it’s a dark time for conferences: they have less attendees & revenue, but they have higher expenses to put on the event (because there are more health concerns to tackle, and all this costs money.) I don’t have easy answers – but as a speaker with asthma, I’m keenly interested in how events protect me and the other attendees. We’ve already got one person in the community being quarantined – we don’t need more. (Send your good vibes & prayers to Tim Radney.)

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Yeah… I alway kind of knew of potential dangers with virus mutations. No natural immunity, no vaccines and a population has become hyper-mobile.
It’s a little overwhelming to actually see the speed at which this is spreading.
I don’t like the idea of modifying my plans/behavior but… might be time.

The counties surrounding Philadelphia(Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware) , have order all state offices closed.

Here in Pennsylvania the state operates all liquor sales, in what PA folks call “State Stores”. So no liquor sales after Monday, “until further notice” :frowning:

I just saw the numbers from South Korea where they test even asymptomatic people. Twenty-year olds are infected and walking around with no fevers and few complications. :worried:

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Just saw these from the city council of Nashville :grimacing:

!

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And now the CDC recommendation to cancel gatherings of over 50 for 8 weeks @ecain :grimacing::grimacing: CDC: Cancel gatherings of 50 people or more for 8 weeks ¯\(ツ)

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I’m thinking that’s pretty much it… it’s over.

Which brings us back to the subject of this thread. Is there a way to do a virtual Insights or do you wait to do it later in the year? Hopefully Covid-19 isn’t like the Spanish flu which started in the Spring and had a resurgence in the Fall. :worried:

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Ever watch Regenesis ?

Is that when Phil Collins became the lead singer? :wink:

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without a vaccine, the experts expect to peak up in 10-12 weeks in infected countries, this is a moderate situation, so we are talking about 6 months in average.

Netflix has a new show “coincidentally” called Pandemic docu-series covering what happened and what will happen at the next pandemic…

Not Quite

Imdb tt0429422

Pick 'em up with your name badge:

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