MONTRÉAL, CANADA – Sherry Lassiter, President & CEO of Fab Foundation sends out a letter announcing some updates for the highly-anticipated Fab events this year, in light of the recent global pandemic. To ensure the safety of its participants and stakeholders, FAB16 and the Fab City Summit in Montréal will be postponed to 2021, while the conference will push through as an online event on July 27-31, 2020.
Read the full letter below:
Dear Friends,
We hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. We realize that this is a very difficult and unique time for all of us, and we are grateful to see your support and commitment to your communities.
As you know, the COVID-19 Pandemic has affected many events and conferences around the world. We have been closely following the official guidance from health authorities and governments (local and national) regarding the coronavirus. Due to the uncertainty that this pandemic has brought to all of us globally, Communautique, Fab City Foundation, The Fab Foundation, and The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT have decided to POSTPONE FAB16 and the Fab City Summit in Montréal until summer of 2021. This was a very difficult decision to make, but everyone’s health and safety comes above all else.
HOWEVER… we have also made the decision to transition this year’s conference to an online event. During the same dates, July 27 – July 31, we will host a worldwide, online FABx Event around the global response to the coronavirus, focused on the technical, economic, social impacts of the pandemic and the implications and applications for digital fabrication and our collective future. The conference title: FABxLive.
In light of the significant public health concerns related to coronavirus, we feel the move to an online event is essential, to keep us safe, to keep us connected, sharing knowledge, and collaborating. As you know, each year, the FABX event brings together members of the fab lab community, as well as government representatives, academic researchers and experts in the field of digital fabrication, to share, vision, explore, collaborate and create community around digital fabrication, manufacturing, technology, education, art and innovation. So this summer, we will do the same, but we will convene online. We still plan to host FAB16 and the Fab City Summit in Montreal in 2021, keeping the ever-relevant theme of Fabricating the Commons. And Bhutan and Mexico are still in line to follow in 2022 and 2023.
Our first priority remains the health and safety of all of YOU – our attendees, our community, and all of your communities. Although we will miss seeing you all in person, we see this transition as a significant opportunity to:
- reach, engage and include many more members of the Fab Lab Network
- distribute the conference in ways that all of the community can contribute to webinars and content.
- enhance the conference experience with additional online features including session recordings, closed captioning, dynamic chat, networking, and note taking features.
- design and create a conference that continues to grow and nurture our community in accessible and inclusive ways
- support the health and well-being of our community
- allow the Network to engage more fully with our partner sponsors
- have a far better environmental impact with no CO2 emissions from travel.
Although we are still in the early phases of the transition to a virtual conference, we look forward to providing you with the same unparalleled opportunities to network, to find your FABmily, to learn from one another and to engage in dialogue that pushes our community and our work forward.
In the coming weeks, we will be sharing the new website, as we select our final platform, identify our esteemed keynote speakers, recruit workshops and curate our programming. We will keep you up to date on the registration process and interface for FABxLive. We know you will have a lot of questions, and we will do our best to answer them as quickly as we can.
So SAVE THE DATES for our first-ever, all-community, online global conference from July 27-31, 2020.
We look forward to a time when we can all be together again. We are so very grateful to have such a dedicated, strong and resilient Fab Lab Network of over 2,000 labs around the world working to support their communities during these difficult times.
Stay safe, stay healthy!
Lass
CEO Fab Foundation
