[Mesa-dev] XDC 2017 feedback

[Rob Clark]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 10:49 PM, Ian Romanick <idr at freedesktop.org> wrote:
> 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.

I have no doubt there is a long lead time on organizing large conf's..
I wasn't calling that into question.  The July date was based on a
quick search of my khr emails.  I couldn't find any earlier reference
to dates, but I could have missed something.

If you had known of the khr dates, and brought it up in Feb (or really
somewhat earlier, given that XDC is roughly same time each year +/-
few weeks), that *might* have been early enough to move things.  But
IIRC there wasn't much flexibility in booking such a large room from
the google side either.  Plus also trying to fit around LPC/etc..
Khronos isn't the only other conference to avoid.  Once the XDC date
is announced and people have begun booking travel, we can't really
move things.  Sorry, it sucks, I wasn't happy about it either, but it
is what it is.  As far as other conferences that XDC attendees are
likely to go to, and given the turn-out (by far largest XDC in NA), I
think the dates worked out reasonably well overall.

BR,
-R