I love our annual meetings. They have been extremely productive and fun. We did not attempt to hold an annual meeting in Summer 2020 due to COVID. But the consensus seems to be that we should try to do it again this summer.
Is anyone willing to take the lead on planning this conference?
I think a few of us at NCAR would be interested in helping out. If it’s virtual (and I suspect it will have to be), we can host it on our Zoom account. …But if people are thinking they want it in person, then we might have to wait to see if NCAR will be open.
CC @matt-long @erogluorhan
If we do it virtually, we should consider using https://gather.town. You have an avatar and you wander around in a virtual conference center and when you get close to other people you can video chat and screen share. So you can have a bunch of rooms where folks are working on different problems, and you can wanter from room to room (or hang out in the hallway) just like the sprints at SciPy. It’s as close to the feeling of an in person meeting I’ve seen so far.
Here’s an example (minus the screensharing aspect) from JuliaCon
That’s really cool. There’s something similar called Wonder (formerly Yotribe) that I’ve wanted to try. But Gather looks pretty cool.
— Kevin
I’m a little tired of virtual event, but for Pangeo this could be my chance to participate to the meeting this year, I don’t think this will be easy to travel to US soon 
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Anyway I’m sorry I won’t be able to help planning it…
It seems like an international in-person conference in August would be impossible. But what about a coordinated series of regional meetups, plus an option for virtual participation? Kind of how the CMIP6 hack worked…
Will it be possible to travel from Boston to NYC in August? Still seems unlikely, but we can always dream! 
I suspect they’re improving constantly, but one thing to keep in mind is number of attendees. We used Wonder when it was still Yotribe for socializing during a Hackweek (June 2020), and it struggled if all 70+ attendees tried to use it at once.
I know that gather.town can handle 100 or even 1000 people.
It costs, but it’s per session and might be worth it!
That’s good to know! Maybe Wonder can handle it now, but maybe we stick with technology we know will work.
It looks like, based on the features of gather.town, that we could benefit from the City tier, which is $6/day/user. So, a week-long event with 100 users would be $3000 total. That doesn’t seem prohibitive.
We can support this level of cost via our Moore foundation grant.
I think that NCAR has some funds left over for travel in the Pangeo EarthCube NCE, too. Seems like we could repurpose travel funds during the pandemic for hosting virtual events…?
Also, I’ve heard rumors that vaccinations for the general public could be completed by July or August, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to assume that people will have their vaccinations before any PangeoCon event. In other words, I tend to believe that we should plan on holding PangeoCon virtually, even if some people can safely travel. Is that everyone else’s feeling as well?