Eurovision Song Contest 2020 (Online)

The Song Contest Forum Staff decided to stop co-working on the project "Eurovision Online" for multiple reasons. Before going any further, Eurovision Online will still happen according to plan and forumers will be able to watch the shows on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday (this is what we've been told) and we still believe you'll be able to see professional produced shows. However, the organization of the show didn't go according to our plan which is why the participating staff members, Jens and Alper decided to stop cooperating. Our main aim was to bring Eurovision fans from as many communities as possible together to have three nice evenings with everything the communities can offer. At the beginning this succeeded, we had great partners with the ESC Fans Club on Facebook, the (Un)official Discord Server and r/eurovision. At some point more people joined who weren't part of a specific community and therefore got in independently. Some great professional people including a co-producer of Eurovision 2016 joined our team and started to make this thing even bigger, maybe too big at some point. The project became less and less intimate and too bureaucratic in our eyes and we started to lose interest in cooperating. More (professional) people joined who made theirselves leaders of the project and even forbid us to post updates about the project on the forum as they wanted full focus on the social media channels. The project more and more turned from an intimate project from fans for fans, which brings communities together, to a commercial project made by professionals. Thus we and members from the original partner communities have made clear that this is not what we want and that things have to change, otherwise we'd leave the project. One of the main producers then told us, mainly in personal messages, to stop pushing our ideas forward. That was the moment we stopped cooperating. We still didn't leave the project though, we only stopped co-working on it. More internal discussions lead to a point where they wanted to merge Eurovision Online with Eurostream and other similar projects, despite us saying that we don't want a merge. They've ignored us and people, such as the commentator Joshua, started to leave the project. Overall, the project got off our hands too quickly and we weren't able to do things as we originally wanted, it changed to a whole different thing which isn't necessarily negative. Personally, I'd like to say that our staff, Jens and Alper tried the best for the project and some of the show's elements are still ours (even though we might not get credited for it). We're really sorry for how things went but this really isn't our fault except that we might added the wrong people who had other aims for the project than us. The reason for posting this just now is that we didn't want to destroy anyone's hope to still have at least a bit Eurovision-feeling this week too early. You can still watch the streams. From what we saw visually, we're sure they'll be good. Would you still like to have an Eurovision event for the forum? We'd love to organize it for you and _just_ for you in a simple way which brings us one or three nice evenings. Feel free to share your thoughts below.