MERL Tech and COVID-19

I hope you and your family and friends are doing well and coping with all the fears and uncertainties and other effects of COVID-19. Here in New York, we are in lock-down mode for the most part. Most everything is closed and only essential things are taking us out of our houses like purchasing food or medicines. It’s very strange to live in this new reality.

I wanted to reach out about MERL Tech Jozi planning. You’ll have noticed that i have not advanced on anything since we last spoke. I started getting nervous about what we should do as I was seeing COVID-19 advancing. I wondered, was the virus going to be everywhere? Should we assume this will all be over by September? Will people be able/willing to travel? What would be happening on the African continent by then with this? Should we cancel? Should we do a virtual event? Should we postpone?

At this point, it’s still very hard to know what to do — MERL Tech requires a lot of up-front planning, time, and work, and if it were to be cancelled after that work, it would be a big loss in terms of time and energy, but also a big financial loss. I assume sponsors and ticket holders would want a refund, and we don’t have any kind of a safety net to manage that.

I considered going virtual, but for two reasons I want to hold off on that:

First, I have not run a virtual event of this size before, so that will require additional skills, platforms, methods, and approaches that need to be tested (hopefully by others first to see what works best) and adapted for MERL Tech. To be honest, I don’t have the brain space in the midst of this crisis to figure that out. I really don’t want to do a webinar style conference where people tune in and then work on their emails at the same time. How can we recreate the energy and vibe of MERL Tech? Or will people be used to doing everything virtual within three months and it will be fine?

I also don’t know what people would be willing to pay for a virtual conference, so I don’t know how I would cover my time for organizing it.  There is a small group of people who are thinking about designing a virtual digital development conference, so if we wait a bit, we can see if there is something in there that could work for MERL Tech — whether we learn from what they do and replicate the good parts, or we join in for a series of smaller thematic sessions about MERL Tech that are part of a larger initiative that covers the “tech and development” space.

Second, I feel it’s really insensitive to do a call for proposals or to market a conference right now when people are dealing with a global crisis of this magnitude and wondering about their futures and their families and their economies at the personal and national levels. I’m also hesitant to do what many others are doing and pivoting to “MERL Tech and Coronavirus.” So again, I want to hold off for a bit to see really — What is the best contribution of MERL Tech and its community in 2020? I think we will have a better idea in a month or two what that is and whether something like MERL Tech is an essential convening for the reality we’ll be in then. Maybe a coronavirus angle will make sense, but I don’t want to make that call right now.

So, I think a better idea is to postpone MERL Tech Jozi until we have a better idea of where everything is heading. There’s no reason we have to do it in September 2020. We could do it in March next year, or at another time, once we understand what our new global reality is going to look like.

I think the best course right now is to wait and see. I’m keeping a close watch on the global situation and the general currents around coronavirus spread and response, and what the global community of MERL and development/humanitarians are doing, saying and predicting.

I’d love your thoughts on this, as I’m sure there are things I haven’t considered.

I do hope that you all get through this without too much added stress or difficulty in your professional and personal lives.

Warm regards, and please stay safe and healthy!