XDC 2018 feedback

[Jason Ekstrand]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 12:29 PM Sean Paul <seanpaul at chromium.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

Agreed.  I felt like a lot of people got almost as much content into their
lightning talk as they would have in a full talk.  It'd also be good to
have them earlier in the week so that there's more time for side
conversations to be sparked by the lightening talks rather than putting
them all on Friday.
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