March 27, 2020 An Update on Uprisor & TCO20

Our world has definitely been turned upside down the last few weeks and months with the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping our globe. Thankfully Topcoder has been a breath of fresh air allowing us to continue with business as usual for the most part. The future of work and reliability of remote work from the safety of our homes is something we are accustomed to. We look forward to continuing to provide impactful projects for our community to compete on and a steady stream of paid work for those relying on income every day.

One of our greatest assets at Topcoder is the ability to bring our remote lives in person at our Regional Topcoder Open events, our collegiate workshops, and our beloved Topcoder Open (TCO) Finals. We cherish these events as a way to get to know so many of you and build stronger relationships with the folks we work with at Topcoder every day.  The beginnings of Uprisor and all that event was to bring us this year, had us on the edge of our seat with excitement. We were building a new empire for the Future of Work industry with Uprisor and providing the best new home possible for the TCO Finals.

After much discussion and debate, we have decided to postpone the grand commencement of Uprisor to a later date. It is our belief that an investment in such an undertaking at this time would be too great a risk for the effort. We are looking forward to continuing to build momentum over the next 18 months to truly bring you the best kick start of Uprisor we can.

The 2020 Topcoder Open finals are still up in the air at this time. We feel it is too soon to make a decision on an event in the fall and therefore will be waiting a few more months to see where the world is at with this COVID-19 pandemic we are in the middle of. Please rest assured if we can do a TCO20 Finals without any negative impact on our community, we will still have one. If we feel it is still unsafe for travel, we will most definitely plan for a virtual event in some way. By no means is this decision an easy one but we are hoping with some more time, we can best navigate this difficult time to make a solid decision for our community and staff.

That said, we have decided to cancel all our in-person workshops and TCO20 Regional Events at this time and are in the process of planning for a virtual presence for these events instead. We promise to keep you posted on all the happenings of our TCO events as soon as we have more insight. If you have any ideas for helping us with virtual events, post here.

Thank you so much for continuing to be a part of our amazing community. We promise to keep working hard every day to bring in new and exciting opportunities for you through education and fun challenges, paid challenges, secure gig work through Talent as a Service (TaaS), and more. Please stay home and keep you and your loved ones healthy. We are all in this storm together and will most definitely make it out stronger.

We invite you all to join us for another Community Town Hall on Tuesday, April 14, 2020, at 10:30 UTC -4. All questions are welcome.