Hi Hans, On Thu, Apr 04, 2024 at 09:29:34AM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote: > Hi all, > > Normally we like to have a one day Media Summit meeting co-located with > the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, however there isn't one this year. > > Instead of organizing an ELC both in North America and in Europe each > year, the Linux Foundation switched to alternating between NA and Europe, > and this year it is in North America. It's a bit of a mess this year actually. The plan announced last year was to de-couple ELC for OSS, as the event grew too big, causing difficulties for attendees to find each other, and increasing the costs quite dramatically. It was deemed not possible to keep organizing two standalone ELC per year in the new setup, so they decided to handle it as LPC, alternating between Europe and North America. In practice, and for a reason that doesn't seem to be public, ELC NA has been collocated with OSS NA, and someone decided to add an ELC component to OSS EU in Vienna without really announcing it. It is a "mini ELC" apparently, with two parallel tracks only. TL;DR: It's a mess and many people in the community are frustrated. > The problem is that most media subsystem developers are based in Europe > for some strange reason. The reason, and a possible change in that particular area of demographics, are likely best discussed face to face in a state of incomplete sobriety :-) In any case, it seems to be a fact at the moment. > So we have to make a choice this year: we can co-locate with the gStreamer > and XDC conference in Montreal, Canada on October 7 or 8, or we can > organize a meeting somewhere in Europe ourselves. One possibility is > to try and co-locate with the Open Source Summit Europe/LPC conferences > in Vienna, Austria in the week of September 16-20. Another is just to > organize something ourselves somewhere in Europe. But that's a last resort, > co-locating with a conference is generally more appealing for people. We also floated the idea of co-locating with Embedded Recipes, but that has been cancelled this year (partly due to the ELC changes). > The advantage of picking Montreal is that the gStreamer conference is > more applicable to the work we do, and we can get a meeting room there > free of charge. Besides, I've never been to Montreal :-) Montréal is nice :-) > But can we get enough of the core media maintainers there? There is no > point otherwise. I suspect that the same company travel constraints that > were present last year are still in force this year. > > If we pick Vienna instead (assuming we can get a meeting room for a decent > price), would that work better? I think we can figure out sponsorship to pay for a room. > So if you are a core media maintainer, or an active media developer interested > in joining a Media Summit, please let me know if: > > 1) Montreal, October 7 or 8, works for me! > 2) Vienna, one day in the period September 16-20, works for me! > > Please respond asap, I'd like to get a clear picture soon, ideally by the end > of next week. I will personally travel to Montréal regardless of where we organize the media summit, so both work for me. I however think it will be difficult to get a large enough audience there, and Vienna seems a better pick. We will need to be careful to select a date that will minimize conflicts though. As LPC is probably the most interesting event that week, and runs from Wednesday to Friday, I think we should pick either Monday the 16th or Tuesday the 17th. -- Regards, Laurent Pinchart
