2020 was a really bad year for planning anything, but that does not mean you should not have one. So here are our plans and ideas for 2021

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Introduction

2020 was a horrible year for planning anything. Maybe, just maybe, 2021 will be better. So here are our plans and ideas for 2021.

COVID-19 has changed a lot, and plans are no exception. The pandemic is here to stay for the forseeable future and nobody really knows, when we will be able to meet again like in the good old days of 2019.

So we have to plan on a sliding scale, where we are always able to retreat into the virtual, or advance into real on the drop of a hat. But back into the real we want and we must return, without being reckless or endangering our friends.

Virtual is here to stay and we want to do more of it, so we came up with the following Ideas for formats.

Format I: Monday Night Specials

This series will continue into 2021. We will have had 38 in 2020 and 2021 has 51 Mondays between the 04th of January and the 20th of December (Excel counted them for us) and we are already booking in the second half of January 2021.

Focus will be on speakers outside of Berlin and Brandenburg, for reasons that we will explain below and we will try to avoid pure advertizing, as you are a pretty expert bunch and marketing folks tend to run out of answers pretty quickly. No offense, marketing is important - couldn’t sell anything without it - but as we are a user group, chances are, many of you are already customers anyway.

More demo, less slides. Finding a good mix between application (how to do x with y) and concepts (s. for example 2020-11-30 Dan Lines, LinearB: Jira is great for product managers, not developers)

Pet project till the end of the year: Organizing a separate space to build a webinar library and maybe adding a bit of Jira to make our pipeline more transparent. Stay tuned.

We will also add a few topical series to this.

• Award Winners: We are starting a series for Codegeist winners on November 2nd with Steffen Opel from Utoolity (2020-11-02 Steffen Opel, Utoolity: Visualize with AWS – maintain diagrams as code with Atlassian Forge ) and want to feature most of them during the year, as they represent the cutting edge of what is (or will be, e.g. Forge is still in beta) possible with Atlassian tools

• Atlassian Alternatives: Some of you are not only users but are either responsible for negotiating (defending?) your Atlassian budget or have to sign off on said budget. So this is kind of a public service: You may not have the time yourself to research alternatives that your users come up with, so let us introduce them and give you an opportunity to ask questions.

As always we are happy to have and welcoming people who are looking for a safe space to test new ideas or start their career as public speakers. Contact us and we will find a slot for you.

Other Formats: Virtual, Hybrid and In-Person

As we said in the introduction, the following is an overview of the other events we have planned for 2021 on a sliding scale between virtual, hybrid and In-Person. (All times are CET).

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Format II: Virtual Breakfast

We are moving these to 9 AM on the first Friday of every month to avoid duplicates with the Thursday events. These are our planning meetings. You can meet us and discuss with us what we are doing and bring your own topics. Anything and everything.

So far these have been very (very) small meetings, if they get bigger we will run this as a lean coffee, Miro board is always available next to the Zoom meeting.

Format III: Hybrid

We want to have in-person events with content again, but to repeat it again - a sliding scale has to apply - and this is where “Hybrid” comes in.

We have two fixed events: In January - start of the year panel with our partners - and in April, our almost traditional Mini-Summit (or is it Mini-Team in 2021? ) with a retrospective of the big Atlassian event of the year.

The other hybrid events focus on local user stories in Berlin and Brandenburg. The basic idea is, we visit a local user in their company office and bring gear that allows for a bidirectional communication with a Zoom crowd. And we want you to present your use case: How does Atlassian help and support your organization to get things done?

We only need a projector and a large monitor (TV) on site.

With that we have basically three options, depending on the pandemic and the location:

1. We can have a closed, invitation only audience on-site, just employees for example, with all the measures the pandemic makes necessary being observed. That makes this format very flexible, because a large auditorium is not necessary any decent size conference room would suffice.

2. We can have a “normal” event, like we had in the good old days of 2019, with catering and open to everyone. This again requires a large auditorium.

3. We can retreat into the virtual, if we have to stay at home to break a new wave.

And we want to use this flexible format to get around more, and have more Brandenburg in our calendar. So go to e.g. Brandenburg in Brandenburg and everybody from Berlin (and elsewhere) can participate via Zoom.

We want to have at least five of these (seven in total), alternating with in-person events on the last Thursday of the month.

Format IV: In-Person

All content events are hybrid, In-Person events are intended as social gatherings and are obviously the most unreliable part of this plan. We will also announce these spontaneously (one week before the event), depending on the current situation and if possible will offer a hybrid alternative, if the In-Person event is not possible.

We hope that by end of March the outdoor season will have started and that some restaurants have survived what is looking like it is going to be a brutal winter for the service industry and that things will gradually get better towards the end of the year, hopefully with a vaccination campaign in full swing.

So, yes, there is a Christmas party, indoors, on this calendar. (JMK: And I, for one, would be happy to get blind drunk and embarrass myself in public more than usual, if that helps to convince the gods to end this BS )

Hope springs eternal.

You

All this is only possible because of you and with you. You can find all our communications channels on aug-bb.atlassian.net. And we will not stop to ask Atlassian (are you listening?) for an unlimited Confluence/Jira cloud instance to allow for even closer collaboration.

And there is room for more. We are open for developer events (Hackathon? Mob Programming Sessions?), contact us, if you are willing and able to help us with that.

Looking forward to 2021.

Stay healty and the best of times

Hubert & Joerg

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