At the Open edX meetup yesterday, the dates for the 2022 Open edX conference have been announced!
It will thus be April 26-29 – and if we meet for the coworking retreat the week before, that gives the following dates to save in your agenda: April 16-29, 2022.
Are you able to attend?
Yes
No
0voters
If you can’t come, please mention why below, so we can try to find a solution – we haven’t seen each other in a while, so it will be important to get as much of the team together as possible.
Looking forward to seeing everyone again! :D It feels like an eternity since we played with falcons in San Diego and ate tacos in Mexico :p That’s 3 years!
So glad we get to give Lisbon another go!
I’ll be there so long as my country lets me out and back in again (which it is at the moment, though with quarantine requirements on re-entry).
@toxinu I’d love that too – I know that’s a frequent comment, and some people at edX/tCRIL would want to do some of the conferences on another continent, but when I asked about it last, the answer was that it was trickier to get the majority of the usual attendees to travel further, since a lot are from the US. Having conferences in Europe is already progress ;p
(Also, the last time edX tried to organize a conference in Asia – the partners one – the university it was meant to happen got a little chaotic, precisely at the conference time Though that hopefully wasn’t related )
But yes, joke aside, that’s something to keep pushing for, as it would help with the diversity of attendees and of people we would get to meet there, and it would bring us to many interesting places we haven’t had a chance to explore yet.
I don’t yet know if I’ll be able to do those dates. It’s right about the time we had planned for our honeymoon-- but we didn’t finalize the planning on that yet and the borders for Japan have been closed. Amber and I will need to pick some cutoff date on decision making for plans there, likely end of January at the latest.
@Fox Keep me updated on this – given how much of a unique opportunity it is to meet with clients and new prospects, it would be problematic to go to the conference without you, even if we put aside the fact that you wouldn’t get to see the team and the rest of the community… If there is anything I can do to help – for example around the dates of the retreat itself – let me know. Maybe a longer honeymoon right after? Or earlier?
This is a bit ironic since it is super easy for Americans and Europeans to go anywhere in the world as opposed to African, Asian, or Russian to travel in Europe and the USA. So obviously a lot of the attendees are Americans and Europeans.
@Fox That’s some supposition but Japan is hoping to re-enable its yearly GOTO domestic traveling campaign in April 2022 (still not sure), international students are still waiting to be able to join their university so tourism has a very low chance to be on their planning for the first half of 2022, to be honest.
Crossing my fingers because I also would like to plan to go back to Japan starting the second part of 2022.
I don’t know how the pandemic situation will be in 4 months. The conference is a gathering of hundreds of people from several countries, that have recently traveled and met many random people, and want to meet more. Then there are social activities, eating together and living together. These are many risk vectors. What health guidelines will be followed? How will we and edX react to changes?
In addition I can’t plan the near-term future or where I’ll be or whether I’ll still be working here.
It’s likely I attend but it can change based on what happens until April.
EDIT: I won’t attend for the reasons mentioned above; see later post
I’ll definitely keep you updated. By the sound of what @toxinu is saying, we will probably need to delay our honeymoon after all. Mostly she and I just need to sit down and make a few judgement calls. Based on a conversation we had yesterday, it’s already starting to look like we may just postpone the honeymoon, but I’ll let you know once we’ve finalized any decisions.
I just want to be sure that I didn’t want to sound really negative but was just trying to give reasonable insights. I really hope you will be able to fulfill this beautiful moment in the best conditions.
@Fox Sounds good - thanks! And indeed, I hope the Covid stuff and the conference won’t get too much in the way – that’s a very special time, so in any case it will be good to make sure you can have a nice honeymoon!
Yup, nobody can know – the planning is based on the assumption that the conference actually happens, which could still change. Knowing edX, and the people who moved to tCRIL, they will stay on top of that, and will adjust the decision based on what happens. They had cancelled the original conference in 2020, have just cancelled the partner conference this winter in Boston, and would do it again if it couldn’t be organized in reasonably safe conditions. I think we can also expect the full range of precautions – mask, distancing, prioritizing outside gatherings – and being in Lisbon helps with this. As long as we do our part, ie testing between travels and getting vaccines, the risk won’t be zero, but it should be measured.
@Fox Sorry for your honeymoon :/ But I’m glad you’ll be able to join at the conference! Hopefully you’ll end up with both a nice honeymoon and a nice conference
I don’t have any conflicting plans on these dates but for now I voted No because whether or not I’ll be able to attend is highly dependent on how the COVID situation develops. (More than one person in my close environment belongs to a high-risk group for COVID and this will play a role when assessing risks involved in attending the conference.)
@Ali Yup! This is for all core team members and contractors, developers or not :) As for the costs and requirements, see https://tasks.opencraft.com/browse/BB-5284 – many of the costs are covered by OpenCraft. The talk submission is important, too :)
@antoviaque Wow, that’s incredibly generous! I am in if Portugal has let South Africa off their travel ban list by then. I really hope they do as I would be sad to miss meeting everyone.
I really want to meet you all.
Though that hopefully wasn’t related 
)
