XDC 2018 feedback

[Heinrich Fink]

Hi,

> > On Monday, 1 October 2018 17:40:02 EEST Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez wrote:
> >> Hello!
> >>
> >> Now that XDC 2018 is over, it is time to gather feedback!

Thank you again for making XDC a great experience! I felt this was a
very relaxed and welcoming conference, thanks to how you organised the
conference (and social events), and thanks to all the volunteers that
were always available to help out. I also really appreciated the
ad-hoc demo setup you have organised, and that I had a chance to give
a presentation on our latency work.

Looking back, I probably should have applied for an actual talk
instead of trying to sneak it in as a demo. Regarding the duration of
talks/slots, I think it would be really helpful in the CFP to suggest
specific durations for presentations (e.g. talk+Q&A 20+5 or 40 + 10).
That might also encourage applications for short presentations that
would exceed the scope of a lightning-talk, but do not quite fit a
full session.

> >> We would like to ask to all the attendees and the ones following us
> > Holding the event at UDC interactions between the university students and our
> > community. During the closing session we have been told that around 30
> > students attended talks, and I believe that in itself is a nice achievement as
> > all interactions with the academic world are beneficial for both sides.
>
> Part of that success is that an introductory talk on Mesa took place two
> weeks before the conference in the Computer Science Faculty. We had ~20
> attendees there. This is something we should repeat in future years too,
> maybe including talks on other parts of the graphics stack too.

I think introductory talks at XDC would be both beneficial for student
attendees, but also professionals who don't have much experience with
the low-level Linux graphics stack yet. For instance, I found the
introductory talk on i965 assembly really interesting, and I probably
wouldn't have looked into it myself. Given that all talks are
recorded, tutorial-level talks provide a great reference for learning
material as well.

>
> >  For
> > future events organized in a similar context, I wonder whether we couldn't go
> > one step further by lowering the barrier to interaction between the two
> > groups. Announcing at the beginning of the conference that students will join
> > could improve the awareness of community members. There also could be other
> > ways to make our hallway track discussions more open to students who may be
> > too shy to interact.
>
> Right.

Another idea to encourage students to interact: maybe a lab-course
with some practical exercise around the open-source graphics stack
could be held in the spring semester / during summer, and students
could present/discuss results with attendees at XDC afterwards?

best regards,

Heinrich