On Fri, 13 Mar 2020 at 09:36, Russell Coker via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019
Coronavirus is spreading exponentially as diseases do. People can be infected for as long as 14 days without showing symptoms, according to Wikipedia 5 days is the average time for symptoms to develop. This means that we won't know when it gets really bad until at least 6 days after it has got really bad.
An interesting question is how long after infection a person becomes infectious. On one podcast I've heard 4 days - meaning on average 1 day of infectious but not yet sick.
The only responsible course of action is to significantly scale back public meetings now to reduce the risk.
Perhaps people could consider an IRC or Audio/Video presentation? I don't know the trade-offs or how viable various packages are in practice though and I suspect it will take some effort to work these out. http://openmeetings.apache.org/ https://openvidu.io/ https://jitsi.org/ Or slightly older review https://opensource.com/alternatives/skype
I have raised this matter for discussion on the committee list but with no reply. So I now publicly propose that all LUV in-person meetings be cancelled from now until the stage where we know the disease is under control. I can't imagine that being before July.
As fun as LUV meetings are, it's not something that's worth risking lives over.
I have some plans for online education which could be run at the times we usually have LUV meetings, follow up here if you want to discuss that. Please use luv-talk if you want to discuss details of the disease.
Perhaps the topics could be proposed and voted on a poll (the venerable luv web site might host this?) I suspect that this type of remote working software is going to be needed for many other organisations than luv in the near future... Andrew