Berlin Skyline by Fred3rik in Wikipedia licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

DevOpsDays Berlin 2020 Cancellation

It saddens us that we have to do this, but we as the DevOpsDays Berlin Organizers don't see a way around this. We sat together at the beginning of July - still unsure if we wanted to run an "in person" conference. Looking at the rules that are in place for Berlin, we could have done this with a very reduced set of attendees, at the date we intended the conference to run. We have to thank the venue for working out a plan that would have enabled this.

We met to get to a decision regarding DevOpsDays Berlin 2020. Though there were good arguments for running the conference, most of us felt uncomfortable to expose people to a potential danger that isn't fully understood yet.
We also decided against taking this conference online. While we do think that there would have been a good number of attendees, we felt that we would miss out with the most important part of the conference:

Bringing people together to listen to talks, getting curious about topics, finding people whose minds to pick, being found to have ones mind picked and talk about this in the Open Spaces and during the hallway track, being excellent to each other.
As nice as video conferencing has become - to us it felt like a bad substitute for the real thing.

What happens next?

So no DevOpsDays Berlin in 2020, but we are planning an event for 2021. We do not have a fixed date yet, but it can be expected that it will fall into the same time as this or the last years: Beginning to middle of fall 2021. We hope that at this time the world knows enough about the virus and related sicknesses to be able to run events like this in a safe environment again.