XDC 2018 feedback

Mon Oct 1 18:03:23 UTC 2018

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 7:29 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.

We did (entirely accidentally) put some lightning talks on Wed, sounds
like something we should keep. Demo track on Wed already is exactly to
kickstart discussions as early as possible.

> 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)?

Not sure on hosting default workshops - we dont have default talks
either. I think requiring a clear agenda, and having a handful of
people signed up already is needed to gauge whether there's anything
to discuss that year. Otherwise we might end up with a compositor
workshop, and no one cares :-) Or wathever the topic is that's not
super pressing that year.

I do agree that scheduling on the wiki doesn't work well. Whiteboard
for workshops (or sticky notes or whatever), similar for lightning
talks, was suggested already by someone else. Doing the entire
sticky-note voting is classic unconference, not sure how well that
works without the brainstorming sessions to get things started. I
guess we could try. This year the workshop stuff seems to have worked
quite a bit better, I think a lot is just that attendees aren't yet
fully used to making them happen. And we sucked at requesting workshop
proposals in the CFP.
-Daniel

> 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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> > >
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> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Daniel Vetter
> > Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
> > +41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch
> > _______________________________________________
> > events mailing list
> > events at lists.x.org
> > https://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/events

-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch