XDC 2018 feedback

[Sean Paul]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 1:13 PM Daniel Vetter <daniel at ffwll.ch> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 6:55 PM Jason Ekstrand <jason at jlekstrand.net> wrote:
> > I'll echo the surprise shared by Markus about not having any window system or input talks this year.
>
> As mentioned, we only had very few compositor talks, and 0 input
> talks. If you want those, make them happen, XDC program is what
> attendees make of it.
>
> > My only real comment was that I think we could have packed more talks in.  We had to turn down piles of talks and, at the same time, often had 20 minute breaks between talks just because someone's talk didn't burn the entire 45-50 minutes.  We probably could have accepted more talks and made the conference better had we done a bunch of 20 minute slots and reserved the 45-minute slots for the talks that actually needed the time.
>
> Yup, that didn't work, because we didn't ask speakers how much time
> they want. A few others mentioned this too, definitely need to fix
> that for next year. With lightning talks, demos, and workshop tracks
> we still managed to squeeze ~40 things into the schedule, so
> personally I'm not yet worried with rejecting proposals. We've also
> extended the travel sponsoring policy, you don't have to be a main
> track speaker to be eligible. What I personally want to avoid is a
> re-run of XDC2016, where we've systematically overrun the program
> because it was too densely packed. But agreed that this year ended up
> with a bit too much discussion space in the main track.
>

Agree with all of the above (and echo my thanks to all of the
organizers and speakers).

I wonder if we could experiment with making the schedule a bit more
back heavy in the future. On the first day+, I find the time between
talks is completely filled with discussion and catching up. By day
2.5/3, I've done most of my talking. Could we make day 3 a little more
dense in order to fit more speakers? Do we have any data on how much
time the average talk consumed?

I thought the lightning talks were amazing, perhaps we could
intermingle 15 minute lighting slots throughout the program next year
as opposed to rapid firing 13 at a time.

We might also consider doing what LF did at plumbers a few years ago.
Provide a communal whiteboard where folks can propose a topic on it
and gauge interest in having a workshop around it (add a tick if you'd
attend). It's hard to know if you'll get quorum for a workshop, and
it's hard to host a workshop without attendees. Or maybe we should
just host a few BoF workshops by default (Display, GPU, Compute,
Compositor)?

All said, I'd be very happy if next year was just like this year :)

Thanks again!

Sean


> Thanks, Daniel
>
>
> >
> > --Jason
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 9:40 AM Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez <siglesias at igalia.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> Now that XDC 2018 is over, it is time to gather feedback!
> >>
> >> We would like to ask to all the attendees and the ones following us
> >> online for feedback about the conference. We are going to forward the
> >> received feedback to X.Org Foundation in order to take it into account
> >> for future events.
> >>
> >> Feel free to reply publicly here, or send it privately to us
> >> (xdc2018 at gpul.org).
> >>
> >> Thanks!
> >>
> >> Sam
> >>
> >>
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>
> --
> Daniel Vetter
> Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
> +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
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