covid-19 update

Believe it or not, but back in December, we decided to make E-Health our focus theme for Swiss Cyber Storm 2020. So when the Covid-19 crisis slowly approached, we padded our shoulders and thought that our gut feeling had been right on target again.

But then things turned really sour, many people died and one conference after the other had to cancel (or went virtual). We thought our date in October was safe, but that was before we looked at the preparations in detail. So here it is:

We are cancelling Swiss Cyber Storm 2020.

There are several reasons, but the most important one is that we want to make it an on-site conference and we want to keep up the quality. This in turn depends on a diverse quality program (and a fun hallway track). And the diverse quality program is only possible with international speakers that offer us their spare time to travel around the globe to speak in front of a Swiss audience. This depends on the goodwill of our speakers and their commitment to our conference and it’s just that most of them can not guarantee their presence in October. Planning is very shaky for them now, flights and schedules are completely uncertain, many companies forbid their employees to travel at all and other speakers want to limit their travelling to paid business trips.

We are always prepared to replace a speaker or two. But selling tickets with the risk of having to set up a completely different program in early October is not honest to you, our audience. We are selling tickets with our program in our hands and if that program is uncertain, how can we sell tickets?

Now we could push through, we could make it an online conference, we could make it a local conference or we could simply look for speakers that are willing to commit – maybe supporting the commitment with financial incentives.
But honestly, that’s not the Swiss Cyber Storm conference we love organizing and would you really attend a full day SCS online without meeting friends and without talking to the speakers over a beer afterwards?

So yeah, this is a bummer, but we can not organize SCS this year.

But maybe you would be interested to attend a one hour thing? A neat online presentation in the SCS spirit, possibly focused on our 2020 focus theme E-Health? That’s what we are looking into now. Just for the fun of it.

Please stay tuned, and in the meantime: Stay healthy my friends!

Christian Folini, Program Chair