[Mesa-dev] XDC 2017 feedback

[Ian Romanick]

On 09/27/2017 04:55 PM, Rob Clark wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 7:25 PM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> wrote:
>> On 09/26/2017 09:57 AM, Daniel Vetter wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> First again big thanks to Stéphane and Jennifer for organizing a great XDC.
>>>
>>> Like last year we'd like to hear feedback on how this year's XDC went,
>>> both the good (and what you'd like to see more of) and the not so
>>> good. Talk selection, organization, location, scheduling of talks,
>>> anything really.
>>
>> Not scheduling it to conflict with another industry event would be a
>> good start.  This is the first XDC that I've missed in nearly a decade.
>> I know I'm not the only person that missed one or the other due to
>> scheduling fail.
> 
> Sadly by the time we were aware of the dates for the khronos f2f it
> was not possible to change the dates for XDC :-(
> 
> The XDC dates were set in Feb, and afaict the khronos dates were
> announced in July (?), so take this up with khronos ;-)

Ok... so we're going to go there.

Frankly, that's a giant steaming load of bull.  Blocks of hotel rooms,
multiple conference rooms for 500+ people, and catering for the Khronos
meeting was booked in late 2016.  We're already working on contracts for
the September 2018 meeting.  Contracts of this scale are really hard to
change.  There are 5x to 10x as many people at a Khronos face-to-face as
at XDC.  Events of that scale have a massively deep pipeline.

Google was just unwilling to find a different dates for space *at their
own campus*.  That's really, really weak.  This is especially
infuriating because there are numerous Googlers who attend the Khronos
meetings.  Did the organizers poll any of them?  The XDC organizers
clearly did not even exercise due diligence to detect a possible
conflict.  If the organizers had cared to be aware of dates of
conflicting events, they would have known.

> BR,
> -R