This morning, we had to make the toughest decision in our team so far. We decided to cancel Kirby Konf
This breaks my heart. I was really looking forward to this first Kirby conference for months and the excitement in our community was incredibly motivating. We were so close to finally meet in real life for the first time.
But the situation in Germany and around the world has changed drastically in the last days and will very likely get worse in the next days and weeks. It also changed our perspective on the risk for the event and the risk that the event poses.
Germany is following the development in Italy very closley with a delay of roughly 10 days. This means that we will likely be having around 4500 cases by the end of March .
The majority of attendees would still not be in direct danger. Most of you are not in the risk group. But one of our speakers had to cancel this morning because he actually is.
With the fast and exponential spreading of the virus, we read a lot more about the importance of slowing down the curve and thus protect our health system and those who are seriously threatened.
Even with a small event, we don’t want to help make the situation worse and increase the risk for our attendees and for others.
As much as I would love to see it differently, Kirby Konf is not an essential event that has to take place at all costs at this time. Health always takes priority! We will try again once the situation has settled down!
We hope you understand that we cannot hang out with you and pretend it’s all fine and have fun together at this point.
Tickets: of course we will reimburse the paid-for-tickets. Please, get in contact: bastian@getkirby.com
Train tickets: The Deutsche Bahn offers free ticket cancellations for those who are affected by a cancelled conference.
You have to send an email at fahrkartenservice@bahn.de with your ticket, the reason for the cancellation and a link to the official cancellation notice by us (https://getkirby.com/konf/cancellation) They told us on the hotline that you need to be patient though.
Lufthansa is offering a similar program and we really hope other airlines do that as well.
Please, let us know if we can help you with anything else around the cancellation! bastian@getkirby.com
We are so sorry - but at the same time we think it is important that everyone lives up to their responsibilities in these days.
This is ours.
– The Kirby team