Jean and I were talking this week about how it’s been 1 year since IndieWebCamp Austin. That was the 3rd IndieWebCamp here, and after it wrapped up we were already talking about plans for 2021, excited to look at potential new spaces for the conference in Austin.
Little did we know last year that IndieWebCamp Austin would be the last in-person IndieWeb event all year, for any city, with everything else cancelled or moved online because of COVID. If the Austin event had been even a couple weeks later, we probably would have cancelled it too, as the scope of COVID was just starting to be understood.
Now a year later, a tragic 500,000 dead in the United States, vaccines are rolling out, and we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think 2021 is going to be largely the same as 2020 in terms of events. WWDC will no doubt be online again too. But I can start to imagine that some in-person events and meetups will come back next year, although surely reimagined around safety. In the meantime there have been a number of online IndieWeb events, both informal meetups and pop-up sessions around specific topics, like improving APIs.
We are also thinking about what a Micro.blog-focused online conference might look like. It has been wonderful to watch the community grow, and there’s so much we could do this year.
