PRESSING PAUSE ON
ALT SUMMIT 2021 UNTIL IT’S
SAFER OUT THERE
Hey there from the Alt Summit team. We’ve got a few updates for you. The main one? It’s a big bummer: It’s too risky to schedule Alt Summit 2021.
As you may remember, lockdown began shortly after Alt Summit 2020. At that time, we couldn’t comprehend what it meant to have a world-wide pandemic; we couldn’t imagine that a whole year later, big meetings and conferences (and travel) would not be safely possible. But here we are, still deep in the pandemic, with numbers of infections and deaths both rising. We have concluded we can not confidently and safely schedule a 2021 in-person conference — not at the end of February, and not any other time in 2021.
We have held off making this announcement, wondering and hoping things might change. We watch vaccine news closely, and we talk to the companies that sponsor Alt Summit to find out when employees will be coming back to their offices, and will be traveling for work again. (Many of those companies aren’t planning to bring employees back until the end of this year.) We considered moving the conference to the summer, and then thought seriously about moving it to the fall. But ultimately decided to press pause on Alt Summit 2021. No matter when we thought about scheduling it, the chances of cancellation were just too high.
You may be wondering: What about a digital event? We have definitely considered this! In fact, Alt Summit held online conferences, along with in-person conferences, for many years. We called our online conferences Alt for Everyone and they were a lot of fun. With that history, having an online Alt Summit conference might seem like a no-brainer. But the feedback we’ve been getting from the community is that people are tired of online events, worn out of zoom meetings, and would rather wait for the IRL option.
So this is our current plan:
Alt Summit 2020 — It was a great success!
Alt Summit 2021 — No thanks, there’s a pandemic.
Alt Summit 2022 — It’s Going To Be the Best Alt Summit Ever!
What if things change? What if it’s safe to have meetings in a few months? Our Answer: That would be amazing! If that happens, we will definitely do all we can to make a 2021 event happen. We are a small and nimble team and would be delighted to put together a 2021 conference if/when it becomes safe to do so.
In the meantime, in order to preserve resources for the next event, we will be putting Alt Summit in a sort-of hibernation. No newsletters, quiet inboxes, and a trimmed back Instagram presence. As soon as we have an event and new dates to announce, we’ll wake up and make some noise again.
If there was no pandemic, in a few short weeks we would be gathering with you in sunny Palm Springs (we can picture how wonderful that would be!), but alas, there IS a pandemic. And Southern California has been hit particularly hard. So instead, we hope you are staying safe, masking up, and getting the vaccine as soon as it’s available to you. While we wait, we’ll content ourselves with looking at all these pretty pictures and daydreaming about Alt Summit 2022.
