Dear Zeek Community,
It is with a heavy heart that we have to announce the cancellation of ZeekWeek 2024. We are 45 days from the beginning of the event at the time of this post, and we have around 9 registrations from non-project-affiliated people.
With this information, we extrapolate probably attendee numbers using registration data of our past events. This made us realize that we will likely not have enough attendees for a successful ZeekWeek this year, leading to the decision to cancel the event.
We are very saddened by this. For us as a team, ZeekWeek has always been the best way for direct interactions with the community. We use it to gather feedback and to get to know our users. Personally I always felt energized by the interactions at ZeekWeek.
The low registrations for ZeekWeek give us pause. We will re-think the event strategy for us as a project. Organizing an event like ZeekWeek takes a lot of volunteer time and energy. In addition to this, it also requires significant financial backing to be able to keep registration prices low.
We hoped to get more interest, as this was our first large in-person event since 2021. Our current working theory is that there just might not be as much interest in these kinds of events anymore.
We are very interested in more information from the community. If you are someone who was planning to come but did not register, had not yet decided, or had decided not to come – please either write to us at info@zeek.org, or fill out this anonymous feedback form.
We apologize to the people that already made travel arrangements – we hope that you will be able to recoup all (or at least most) of your costs.
We are going to fully refund the registration of everyone who registered so far. Please give us a couple of days to get this done; we will also reach out to each of you by email. If you did register and do not receive an email or refund in the next couple of days, please contact us.
Johanna Amann for the Zeek LT