Hello all APIO delegation leaders,
Thank you for responding to our last email regarding APIO 2020. The responses are very helpful for us in deciding the administration of APIO 2020. The organizer of APIO 2020 has recently met online to evaluate the situation and we would like to share the decision outcomes to you.
We understand that COVID-19 cases are currently on the rise, and many countries have started enforcing lockdown/quarantine policies recently. Therefore, we have to acknowledge that several more important things (such as adapting lifestyle and WFH environment) are probably consuming our time and mind right now. Participating in programming competitions might still not be in our top priorities. Based on this, as well as the responses we received, we have decided to postpone APIO 2020 to 15 - 16 August 2020.
We also realize that the pandemic we are currently facing will take a long time to recover. Even until the end of the year, we are not sure whether the state of the world will return to normal. In particular, some APIO delegation countries might still enforce some form of quarantine. Therefore, we decided that we will conduct a full online APIO, where delegations do not need to form a contest site and gather the contestants. The contestants are allowed to participate in the contest from their place and trust them to follow the rules of APIO 2020. However, contestants of each country still have to be registered by the delegation leaders, and each country may only register up to 60 contestants.
We understand that it is harder to hold the integrity of the contest in a full online APIO. However, we believe that it is hard to enforce all APIO delegation countries to gather their contestants before the end of this year. We also believe that APIO 2020 is a positive activity to run, instead of not running it at all, regardless of the format.
We hope that the additional 3 months allow all of us to adapt with more important needs in our life first, and then to adapt and prepare with the format change. We also will extend the registration deadline to Thursday, 16 July 2020. We will update all information on our website.
We are still considering the detailed rules of a full online APIO (e.g. whether contestants from the same delegation are allowed to participate in different timing) and we will post it on our website as soon as possible. We will do our best to find a good balance between feasibility and holding integrity of the contest in running a full online APIO. If you have an idea regarding this, we would be very happy to hear it.
We hope this new information gives us more time and flexibility in making plans. We will keep you all updated as things develop further. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at info.apio2020@toki.id.
Thank you