Well not quite today, or even tomorrow, or likely even this year, but meetups may actually have an opportunity in the near future to get people in the same room.

Over at WordPress.org, Proposal: Decision making checklist for safe, in-person meetups, has been submitted for discussion and feedback (due by Friday, January 15, 2021). This comes with a pretty extensive checklist and qualifiers to even begin the thinking process about returning to in-person. Here is the proposed 14 point checklist:

1. Is your country’s (or state’s) average positivity rate over the past 28 days under 4%?
2. In the past 28 days, has your country or area’s basic reproduction number stayed under 1?
3. In the past 14 days, have there been under 50 new cases per 100,000 people reported?
4. Does your local government allow for in-person events?
5. If there is a cap on the number of people who can meet at a time, will you as an organizer follow this guideline?
6. If there is a cost associated with your venue, is that fee fully refundable or transferable to another date?*
7. Does your venue allow for safe social distancing practices?
8. Does your venue have cleaning protocols in place to sanitize the space between uses?
9. Are you and other organizers willing to enforce the use of masks, hand sanitization, and social distancing, as recommended in your country or area?
10. In order to use local data to predict the safety of attendees, in-person events are required to be open only to residents of your immediate area. Are you and other organizers willing to enforce this expectation?
11. Are you and other organizers ready to require RSVP in the Meetup.com, or to gather attendee contact lists in some other way?

I certainly encourage people to engage with this proposal if they have feedback.