Re: [LSFMMBPF TOPIC] Killing LSFMMBPF

Josef Bacik
2020-03-06T16:31:50Z

On 3/6/20 11:28 AM, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 08:15:10AM -0800, James Bottomley wrote:
>> On Fri, 2020-03-06 at 09:35 -0500, Josef Bacik wrote:
>>> Many people have suggested this elsewhere, but I think we really need
>>> to seriously consider it. Most of us all go to the Linux Plumbers
>>> conference. We could accomplish our main goals with Plumbers without
>>> having to deal with all of the above problems.
>>
>> [I'm on the Plumbers PC, but not speaking for them, just making general
>> observations based on my long history helping to run Plumbers]
>>
>> Plumbers has basically reached the size where we can't realistically
>> expand without moving to the bigger venues and changing our evening
>> events ... it's already been a huge struggle in Lisbon and Halifax
>> trying to find a Restaurant big enough for the closing party.
>>
>> The other reason for struggling to keep Plumbers around 500 is that the
>> value of simply running into people and having an accidental hallway
>> track, which is seen as a huge benefit of plumbers, starts diminishing.
>> In fact, having a working hallway starts to become a problem as well
>> as we go up in numbers (plus in that survey we keep sending out those
>> who reply don't want plumbers to grow too much in size).
>>
>> The other problem is content: you're a 3 day 4 track event and we're a
>> 3 day 6 track event. We get enough schedule angst from 6 tracks ... 10
>> would likely become hugely difficult. If we move to 5 days, we'd have
>> to shove the Maintainer Summit on the Weekend (you can explain that one
>> to Linus) but we'd still be in danger of the day 4 burn out people used
>> to complain about when OLS and KS were co-located.
>>
>> So, before you suggest Plumbers as the magic answer consider that the
>> problems you cite below don't magically go away, they just become
>> someone else's headache.
>>
>> That's not to say this isn't a good idea, it's just to execute it we'd
>> have to transform Plumbers and we should have a community conversation
>> about that involving the current Plumbers PC before deciding it's the
>> best option.
>
> It's unlikely that this could still be done given that we're also facing
> a little uncertainty for Plumbers. It seems like a lot of additional
> syncing would be needed.
> But the main concern I have is that co-locating both is probably quite
> challenging for anyone attending both especially when organizing
> something like a microconference.
>

Yeah I want to be clear I'm not talking about this years conference, I'm talking
about future conferences and if/how we want to make changes.

I picked plumbers because by-in-large the overlap between plumbers attendance
and LSFMMBPF attendance is pretty large, but obviously it doesn't have to be
just that. Ted and others have suggested having a larger more inclusive
conference opposite of plumbers, which I think is a really cool idea. Thanks,

Josef