Jason, > Yes, I can confirm this from another smaller hotel-style conference > I've been involved organizing on occasion. $600-$800 is required to > break even without major sponsorship $$ for the ~100 people mark, and > that is without the usual food and venue perks we see at > plumbers/lsfmm. Yep. Our actual per-person cost for LSF/MM/BPF is in excess of $1K. That limits who we can invite. Personally I absolutely hate the invitation aspect and process. But we are very constrained wrt. how many we can actually accommodate by the amount of funding we get. Things appear to be better this year, but sponsor mergers and acquisitions have been a major concern the past few years. The premise of LSF/MM/BPF is to provide a venue where the right people can talk low-latency, face to face. Without the distractions of a 1000 person event setting. The reason LSF/MM/BPF has been free to attend has been to ensure that attendance fees wouldn't be a deterrent for the people who should be there. The downside is that the invitation process has been a deterrent for other, likely valuable, contributors. I would love for LSF/MM/BPF/BBQ to be an umbrella event like LPC where we could have miniconfs with all the relevant contributors for each topic area to be present. The addition of the 3rd day was done to facilitate that so that XFS folks, btrfs folks, etc. could congregate in a room to discuss things only they cared about. But the current attendance headcount cap means that not all topics can be covered due to crucial people missing. Also, there are several areas where I do think that the present LSF/MM format still has merit. First of all, not all topics are large enough to justify an entire miniconf or topic-specific workshop. We have many topics that can be covered in an hour or less and that's the end of that. The other aspect is that key people straddle multiple filesystems, subsystems, etc. If we *only* had XFS/btrfs/BPF miniconfs, scheduling would be near impossible. Hence the current division between scheduled days and workshop day. Also, we do have cross-track topics that need involvement across the board. I would personally be happy with 1 track day and 2 workshop days if we could get critical mass for the workshop topics. In the old days, when LSF tracks were 10-12 people each, I felt we got stuff done. Since then we have more than doubled the headcount for each track in an attempt to get more people involved. But I feel that the discussions are much less useful. Despite enforcing the no-slides rules, etc. If we combine sponsor funding with per-attendee fees to facilitate a larger event, the question becomes: What should the headcount limit be? 200? 500? The reason I ask is that I think funding can be worked out. But I also think it is important enough that we don't exceed the "productive group size" too much for a given topic. And we usually put that somewhere between 10 and 15. It is very rare to see more than this many attendees actively participate in a discussion. This means for an attendee cap of 200, we should aim to have ~20 concurrent topics happening for it to be productive. Maybe slash that number in half to compensate for the people in the hallway tracks? One thing a few of us discussed a year or two ago was to have actual per-session headcount limits. And make people bid on the sessions they wanted to participate in and then cap each session at 15. That would obviously be very hard to schedule and enforce. But I still think we need to think about how we can bring N hundred people together and make sure they congregate in productive groups of 10-15. That's really the key as far as I'm concerned. We have tried the pure unconference approach and that wasn't very productive either. So we need to land somewhere in the middle... -- Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering
