Here we are (I'm lower-left) gathering to take the DNN Summit group picture. When can we get together again? I’m pleased to see a new effort underway (as I am with any effort, frankly) to bring people together to present, share and discuss our favorite website building platform, DNN. 

Gifford Watkins, the man behind Atlantic Web Fitters, and long-time fan of the DNN Platform, is organizing a virtual conference held July 31 through August 3 of this year on the new hopin.to virtual conference platform.

UPDATE (added 7/28): Ready to connect this week? Well, it's been postponed until October. Seems speakers were pushing back on the abrupt notice, so Gif pushed it out a few months. 

Numerous well-known DNN experts are scheduled to speak, and I’m lucky to be counted among them. At the time I write this, I’m not sure what my topic will be, even though it’s only a few weeks away, and that appears to be the case with most of the speakers since the conference was announced very suddenly. 

But that’s Gifford. Not a man to dawdle, he was inspired in October of 2010 at our Day of DNN in Chicago and went home and started plans for his own Nova Scotia Day of DNN the next summer. 

DNN Connect, which was to be held in Europe this past June, had to be canceled to combat the spread of Covid-19, and now that early attempts to reopen events around the world have resulted in spikes of new cases, everybody is pushing events further into the future. DNN Summit, planned for February of 2021, is now canceled, tentatively pushed back to either October of 2021 or February of 2022.

Where can we learn about DNN until then? Of course, Ryan Moore, David Poindexter and Clint Patterson offer up good info each month at the Southern Fried DNN virtual meeting. And there's numerous blog posts like this one and those at DNN-Connect.org. Gifford's show is the latest one.

I don’t usually get a chance to speak to the leaders of DNN Connect (the organization name as well as the conference name) but I talk regularly with the DNN Association, who runs the DNN Summit, and although (following the rules of a non-profit organization) it can’t promote or sponsor another event itself, many who volunteer to run the Summit applaud Gifford (and anybody for that matter) who takes the initiative to get us all together.  

You can learn more about the DNN Global 2020 conference at its official event page on the hopin.to website (https://hopin.to/events/dnn-global) and in the coming days there should be even more details there. The price for a ticket is $100. I know there are some free tickets floating around so talk to your DNN friends. And while you have to decide for yourself if you’ll pay the price or not, I have to say, for the value that this Open Source project has provided to so many, for the revenue it’s produced for my company, and simply for the chance to talk to industry experts about ways to improve my business around the DNN Platform, it’s pretty cheap. I’ve picked up larger bar tabs, and got little more than a headache for it.

I hope to bump into you - virtually of course - at the DNN Global 2020 conference.