[LSFMMBPF TOPIC] Killing LSFMMBPF

Josef Bacik
2020-03-06T14:35:45Z

Hello,

This has been a topic that I've been thinking about a lot recently, mostly
because of the giant amount of work that has been organizing LSFMMBPF. I was
going to wait until afterwards to bring it up, hoping that maybe it was just me
being done with the whole process and that time would give me a different
perspective, but recent discussions has made it clear I'm not the only one.

LSFMMBPF is not useful to me personally, and not an optimal use of the
communities time. The things that we want to get out of LSFMMBPF are (generally)

1) Reach consensus on any multi-subsystem contentious changes that have come up
over the past year.

2) Inform our fellow developers of new things that we are working on that we
would like help with, or need to think about for the upcoming year.

3) "Hallway track". We are after all a community, and I for one like spending
time with developers that I don't get to interact with on a daily basis.

4) Provide a way to help integrate new developers into the community with face
time. It is far easier to work with people once you can put a face to a name,
and this is especially valuable for new developers.

These are all really good goals, and why we love the idea of LSFMMBPF. But
having attended these things every year for the last 13 years, it has become
less and less of these things, at least from my perspective. A few problems (as
I see them) are

1) The invitation process. We've tried many different things, and I think we
generally do a good job here, but the fact is if I don't know somebody I'm not
going to give them a very high rating, making it difficult to actually bring in
new people.

2) There are so many of us. Especially with the addition of the BPF crowd we
are now larger than ever. This makes problem #1 even more apparent, even if I
weighted some of the new people higher who's slot should they take instead? I
have 0 problems finding 20 people in the FS community who should absolutely be
in the room. But now I'm trying to squeeze in 1-5 extra people. Propagate that
across all the tracks and now we're at an extra 20ish people.

3) Half the people I want to talk to aren't even in the room. This may be a
uniquely file system track problem, but most of my work is in btrfs, and I want
to talk to my fellow btrfs developers. But again, we're trying to invite an
entire community, so many of them simply don't request invitations, or just
don't get invited.

3) Sponsorships. This is still the best way to get to all of the core
developers, so we're getting more and more sponsors in order to buy their slots
to get access to people. This is working as intended, and I'm not putting down
our awesome sponsors, but this again adds to the amount of people that are
showing up at what is supposed to be a working conference.

4) Presentations. 90% of the conference is 1-2 people standing at the front of
the room, talking to a room of 20-100 people, with only a few people in the
audience who cares. We do our best to curate the presentations so we're not
wasting peoples time, but in the end I don't care what David Howells is doing
with mount, I trust him to do the right thing and he really just needs to trap
Viro in a room to work it out, he doesn't need all of us.

5) Actually planning this thing. I have been on the PC for at least the last 5
years, and this year I'm running the whole thing. We specifically laid out
plans to rotate in new blood so this sort of thing stopped happening, and this
year we've done a good job of that. However it is a giant amount of work for
anybody involved, especially for the whole conference chair. Add in something
like COVID-19 to the mix and now I just want to burn the whole thing to the
ground. Planning this thing is not free, it does require work and effort.

So what do I propose? I propose we kill LSFMMBPF.

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.

1) The invitation process. This goes away. The people/companies that want to
discuss things with the rest of us can all get to plumbers the normal way. We
get new blood that we may miss through the invitation process because they can
simply register for Plumbers on their own.

2) Presentations. We can have track miniconfs where we still curate talks, but
there could be much less of them and we could just use the time to do what
LSFMMBPF was meant to do, put us all in a room so we can hack on things together.

3) BOFs. Now all of the xfs/btrfs/ext4 guys can show up, because again they
don't have to worry about some invitation process, and now real meetings can
happen between people that really want to talk to each other face to face.

4) Planning becomes much simpler. I've organized miniconf's at plumbers before,
it is far simpler than LSFMMBPF. You only have to worry about one thing, is
this presentation useful. I no longer have to worry about am I inviting the
right people, do we have enough money to cover the space. Is there enough space
for everybody? Etc.

I think this is worth a discussion at the very least. Maybe killing LSFMMBPF is
too drastic, maybe there are some other ideas that would address the same
problems. I'd love to hear the whole communities thoughts on this, because
after all this is supposed to be a community event, and we should all be heard.
Thanks,