Don't forget about Vault - there were some very useful hallway discussions at Vault this year as well ... even if a bit smaller than it should be ... On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 8:36 AM Josef Bacik <josef@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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, > -- Thanks, Steve
