Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Theodore Ts'o]

[ Feel free to forward this to other Linux kernel mailing lists as
  appropriate -- Ted ]

This year, the Maintainers and Kernel Summit is currently planned to
be held in Dublin, Ireland, September 27 -- 29th.  Of course, this is
subject to change depending on how much progress the world makes
towards vaccinating the population against the COVID-19 virus, and
whether employers are approving conference travel.  At this point,
there's a fairly good chance that we will need to move to a virtual
conference format, either for one or both of the summits.

As in previous years, the Maintainers Summit is invite-only, where the
primary focus will be process issues around Linux Kernel Development.
It will be limited to 30 invitees and a handful of sponsored
attendees.

The Kernel Summit is organized as a track which is run in parallel
with the other tracks at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), and is
open to all registered attendees of LPC.

Linus has generated a core list of people to be invited to the
Maintainers Summit, and the program committee will be using that list
a starting point of people to be considered.  People who suggest
topics that should be discussed at the Maintainers Summit will also be
added to the list for consideration.  To make topic suggestions for
the Maintainers Summit, please send e-mail to the
ksummit@lists.linux.dev with a subject prefix of [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT].

(Note: The older ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org list has
been migrated to lists.linux.dev, with the subscriber list and
archives preserved.)

The other job of the program committee will be to organize the program
for the Kernel Summit.  The goal of the Kernel Summit track will be to
provide a forum to discuss specific technical issues that would be
easier to resolve in person than over e-mail.  The program committee
will also consider "information sharing" topics if they are clearly of
interest to the wider development community (i.e., advanced training
in topics that would be useful to kernel developers).

To suggest a topic for the Kernel Summit, please do two things.
First, please tag your e-mail with [TECH TOPIC].  As before, please
use a separate e-mail for each topic, and send the topic suggestions
to the ksummit-discuss list.

Secondly, please create a topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference
proposal submission site and target it to the Kernel Summit track.
For your convenience you can use:

	https://bit.ly/lpc21-summit

Please do both steps.  I'll try to notice if someone forgets one or
the other, but your chances of making sure your proposal gets the
necessary attention and consideration are maximized by submitting both
to the mailing list and the web site.

People who submit topic suggestions before June 12th and which are
accepted, will be given free admission to the Linux Plumbers
Conference.

We will be reserving roughly half of the Kernel Summit slots for
last-minute discussions that will be scheduled during the week of
Plumbers, in an "unconference style".  This allows last-minute ideas
that come up to be given given slots for discussion.

If you were not subscribed on to the kernel@lists.linux-dev mailing
list from last year (or if you had removed yourself from the
ksummit-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org mailing list after the
previous year's kernel and maintainers' summit summit), you can
subscribe sending an e-mail to:

	ksummit+subscribe@lists.linux.dev

The mailing list archive is available at:

	https://lore.kernel.org/ksummit

The program committee this year is composed of the following people:

Jens Axboe
Arnd Bergmann
Jon Corbet
Greg Kroah-Hartman
Ted Ts'o

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Jiri Kosina]

On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> This year, the Maintainers and Kernel Summit is currently planned to
> be held in Dublin, Ireland, September 27 -- 29th.  

Hi Ted,

given the fact that OSS is being relocated from Dublin to Washington [1], 
is Kernel Summit following that direction?

[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/press-release/the-linux-foundation-announces-open-source-summit-embedded-linux-conference-2021-will-move-from-dublin-ireland-to-seattle-washington/

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 12:29:52PM +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> > This year, the Maintainers and Kernel Summit is currently planned to
> > be held in Dublin, Ireland, September 27 -- 29th.  
> 
> Given the fact that OSS is being relocated from Dublin to Washington [1], 
> is Kernel Summit following that direction?
> 
> [1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/press-release/the-linux-foundation-announces-open-source-summit-embedded-linux-conference-2021-will-move-from-dublin-ireland-to-seattle-washington/

Apologies for the delay in responding; I wasiting for the LPC to post
its announcement that the LPC will be going 100% virtual:

   https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/blog/2021/index.php/2021/04/30/linux-plumbers-goes-fully-virtual/

As the LPC planning committee stated,

   "Unfortunately, the safety protocols imposed by event venues in the
   US require masks and social distancing which make it impossible to
   hold the interactive part of Plumbers (the Microconferences)."

The Maintainer's Summit is even more interactive and discussion
focused than most of the Microconferences.  In addition, for the last
few years, the Kernel Summit is run as a track at the LPC.  As a
result, both the Maintainer's and Kernel Summit will be held virtually
this year, using the LPC infrastructure, and will not be colocated
with OSS to Seattle.  We'll make sure the dates (plus some buffer for
travel) won't overlap to avoid creating conflicts for those who are
planning to attend OSS in Seattle.

I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and Maintainer's
Summit, we're going to have to wait for another year,

Cheers,

					- Ted

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Christoph Lameter]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and Maintainer's
> Summit, we're going to have to wait for another year,

Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Greg KH]

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and Maintainer's
> > Summit, we're going to have to wait for another year,
> 
> Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
> 

Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the world
are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(

greg k-h

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > 
> > > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> > > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
> > > Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
> > > year,
> > 
> > Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
> > 
> 
> Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the world
> are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(

The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
people younger than me are already vaccinated.  I think by the end of
September the situation will be better ... especially if the EU and US
agree on this air bridge (and the US actually agrees to let EU people
in).

One of the things Plumbers is thinking of is having a meetup at what
was OSS EU but which is now in Seattle.  The Maintainer's summit could
do the same thing.  We couldn't actually hold Plumbers in Seattle
because the hotels still had masks and distancing requirements for
events that effectively precluded the collaborative aspects of
microconferences, but evening events will be governed by local
protocols, rather than the Hotel, which are already more relaxed.

Regards,

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 07:58:10AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> > > > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
> > > > Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
> > > > year,
> > > 
> > > Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
> > > 
> > 
> > Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the world
> > are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(
> 
> The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
> people younger than me are already vaccinated.  I think by the end of
> September the situation will be better ... especially if the EU and US
> agree on this air bridge (and the US actually agrees to let EU people
> in).
> 
> One of the things Plumbers is thinking of is having a meetup at what
> was OSS EU but which is now in Seattle.  The Maintainer's summit could
> do the same thing.  We couldn't actually hold Plumbers in Seattle
> because the hotels still had masks and distancing requirements for
> events that effectively precluded the collaborative aspects of
> microconferences, but evening events will be governed by local
> protocols, rather than the Hotel, which are already more relaxed.

Umm.  Let's remember that the vaccines are 33-93% effective [1],
which means that there's approximately a 100% certainty that at least
one person arriving at the event from a trans-atlantic flight has been
exposed to someone who has the virus.  I'm not convinced that holding a
"more relaxed protocol" event is a great idea.

[1] Depending exactly which vaccine, which variant, how many doses, etc, etc
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-preprint-from-phe-on-vaccine-effectiveness-against-the-b-1-617-2-indian-variant/

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 16:11 +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 07:58:10AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter
> > > wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> > > > > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
> > > > > Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
> > > > > year,
> > > > 
> > > > Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the
> > > world are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(
> > 
> > The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
> > people younger than me are already vaccinated.  I think by the end
> > of September the situation will be better ... especially if the EU
> > and US agree on this air bridge (and the US actually agrees to let
> > EU people in).
> > 
> > One of the things Plumbers is thinking of is having a meetup at
> > what was OSS EU but which is now in Seattle.  The Maintainer's
> > summit could do the same thing.  We couldn't actually hold Plumbers
> > in Seattle because the hotels still had masks and distancing
> > requirements for events that effectively precluded the
> > collaborative aspects of microconferences, but evening events will
> > be governed by local protocols, rather than the Hotel, which are
> > already more relaxed.
> 
> Umm.  Let's remember that the vaccines are 33-93% effective [1],
> which means that there's approximately a 100% certainty that at least
> one person arriving at the event from a trans-atlantic flight has
> been exposed to someone who has the virus.  I'm not convinced that
> holding a "more relaxed protocol" event is a great idea.

Well, I'm not going to get into a debate over the effectiveness of the
current vaccines.  I will say that all conferences have to now
recognize that a sizeable proportion of former attendees will have
fears about travelling and therefore remote components are going to be
a fixture of conferences going forward.

However, while we should accommodate them, we can't let these fears
override people willing to take the risk and meet in person.

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:27:44AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 16:11 +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 07:58:10AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > > > On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter
> > > > wrote:
> > > > > On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > > > 
> > > > > > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> > > > > > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
> > > > > > Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
> > > > > > year,
> > > > > 
> > > > > Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
> > > > 
> > > > Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the
> > > > world are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(
> > > 
> > > The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
> > > people younger than me are already vaccinated.  I think by the end
> > > of September the situation will be better ... especially if the EU
> > > and US agree on this air bridge (and the US actually agrees to let
> > > EU people in).
> > > 
> > > One of the things Plumbers is thinking of is having a meetup at
> > > what was OSS EU but which is now in Seattle.  The Maintainer's
> > > summit could do the same thing.  We couldn't actually hold Plumbers
> > > in Seattle because the hotels still had masks and distancing
> > > requirements for events that effectively precluded the
> > > collaborative aspects of microconferences, but evening events will
> > > be governed by local protocols, rather than the Hotel, which are
> > > already more relaxed.
> > 
> > Umm.  Let's remember that the vaccines are 33-93% effective [1],
> > which means that there's approximately a 100% certainty that at least
> > one person arriving at the event from a trans-atlantic flight has
> > been exposed to someone who has the virus.  I'm not convinced that
> > holding a "more relaxed protocol" event is a great idea.
> 
> Well, I'm not going to get into a debate over the effectiveness of the
> current vaccines.  I will say that all conferences have to now
> recognize that a sizeable proportion of former attendees will have
> fears about travelling and therefore remote components are going to be
> a fixture of conferences going forward.
> 
> However, while we should accommodate them, we can't let these fears
> override people willing to take the risk and meet in person.

The interesting question is how we'll make sure that those people will
not be de facto excluded from the community, or end up as second-class
citizens.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Toke Høiland-Jørgensen]

Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> writes:

> On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 07:58:10AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
>> On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
>> > On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>> > > On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>> > > 
>> > > > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
>> > > > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
>> > > > Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
>> > > > year,
>> > > 
>> > > Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
>> > > 
>> > 
>> > Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the world
>> > are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(
>> 
>> The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
>> people younger than me are already vaccinated.  I think by the end of
>> September the situation will be better ... especially if the EU and US
>> agree on this air bridge (and the US actually agrees to let EU people
>> in).
>> 
>> One of the things Plumbers is thinking of is having a meetup at what
>> was OSS EU but which is now in Seattle.  The Maintainer's summit could
>> do the same thing.  We couldn't actually hold Plumbers in Seattle
>> because the hotels still had masks and distancing requirements for
>> events that effectively precluded the collaborative aspects of
>> microconferences, but evening events will be governed by local
>> protocols, rather than the Hotel, which are already more relaxed.
>
> Umm.  Let's remember that the vaccines are 33-93% effective [1],
> which means that there's approximately a 100% certainty that at least
> one person arriving at the event from a trans-atlantic flight has been
> exposed to someone who has the virus.  I'm not convinced that holding a
> "more relaxed protocol" event is a great idea.

Not to mention the fact that this would exclude everyone from parts of
the world that do not have a high vaccine coverage or a cosy "air
bridge" type relationship with the US (whatever that means); aren't we
supposed to be an international community? :/

-Toke

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:31 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:27:44AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
[...]
> > Well, I'm not going to get into a debate over the effectiveness of
> > the current vaccines.  I will say that all conferences have to now
> > recognize that a sizeable proportion of former attendees will have
> > fears about travelling and therefore remote components are going to
> > be a fixture of conferences going forward.
> > 
> > However, while we should accommodate them, we can't let these fears
> > override people willing to take the risk and meet in person.
> 
> The interesting question is how we'll make sure that those people
> will not be de facto excluded from the community, or end up as
> second-class citizens.

Before the pandemic, there was a small contingent who refused to fly
for various reasons.  We did sort of accommodate that by rotating the
conference to Europe where more people could come in by train (like
they did in Lisbon) but we didn't govern the whole conference by trying
to make aerophobes first class citizens.

The bottom line is that as long as enough people are willing to meet in
person and in-person delivers more value that remote (even though we'll
try to make remote as valuable as possible) we should do it.   We
should not handicap the desires of the one group by the fears of the
other because that's a false equality ... it's reducing everyone to the
level of the lowest common denominator rather than trying to elevate
people.

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi James,

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:44:23AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:31 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:27:44AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> [...]
> > > Well, I'm not going to get into a debate over the effectiveness of
> > > the current vaccines.  I will say that all conferences have to now
> > > recognize that a sizeable proportion of former attendees will have
> > > fears about travelling and therefore remote components are going to
> > > be a fixture of conferences going forward.
> > > 
> > > However, while we should accommodate them, we can't let these fears
> > > override people willing to take the risk and meet in person.
> > 
> > The interesting question is how we'll make sure that those people
> > will not be de facto excluded from the community, or end up as
> > second-class citizens.
> 
> Before the pandemic, there was a small contingent who refused to fly
> for various reasons.  We did sort of accommodate that by rotating the
> conference to Europe where more people could come in by train (like
> they did in Lisbon) but we didn't govern the whole conference by trying
> to make aerophobes first class citizens.
> 
> The bottom line is that as long as enough people are willing to meet in
> person and in-person delivers more value that remote (even though we'll
> try to make remote as valuable as possible) we should do it.   We
> should not handicap the desires of the one group by the fears of the
> other because that's a false equality ... it's reducing everyone to the
> level of the lowest common denominator rather than trying to elevate
> people.

This should take into account the size of each group, and I believe even
then it won't be a binary decision, there's lots of variation in local
situations, creating more than just two groups of coward/careless people
(let's not debate those two words if possible, they're not meant to
insult anyway, but to emphasize that there are more categories). While I
believe that in-person meetings will become the norm again in a
reasonably near future, 2021 seems a bit premature to me.

If we want to brainstorm alternate solutions, an option could be to
split the monolithic conference location into a small set of
geographically distributed groups (assuming local travel would be easier
and generally seen as an accepted solution compared to intercontinental
travels) and link those through video conferencing. I don't have high
hopes that this would be feasible in practice given the increase in
efforts and costs to organize multiple locations in parallel, but maybe
something interesting could come out of discussing different options.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:55 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hi James,
> 
> On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:44:23AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:31 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > > On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:27:44AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > [...]
> > > > Well, I'm not going to get into a debate over the effectiveness
> > > > of the current vaccines.  I will say that all conferences have
> > > > to now recognize that a sizeable proportion of former attendees
> > > > will have fears about travelling and therefore remote
> > > > components are going to be a fixture of conferences going
> > > > forward.
> > > > 
> > > > However, while we should accommodate them, we can't let these
> > > > fears override people willing to take the risk and meet in
> > > > person.
> > > 
> > > The interesting question is how we'll make sure that those people
> > > will not be de facto excluded from the community, or end up as
> > > second-class citizens.
> > 
> > Before the pandemic, there was a small contingent who refused to
> > fly for various reasons.  We did sort of accommodate that by
> > rotating the conference to Europe where more people could come in
> > by train (like they did in Lisbon) but we didn't govern the whole
> > conference by trying to make aerophobes first class citizens.
> > 
> > The bottom line is that as long as enough people are willing to
> > meet in person and in-person delivers more value that remote (even
> > though we'll try to make remote as valuable as possible) we should
> > do it.   We should not handicap the desires of the one group by the
> > fears of the other because that's a false equality ... it's
> > reducing everyone to the level of the lowest common denominator
> > rather than trying to elevate people.
> 
> This should take into account the size of each group, and I believe
> even then it won't be a binary decision, there's lots of variation in
> local situations, creating more than just two groups of
> coward/careless people (let's not debate those two words if possible,
> they're not meant to insult anyway, but to emphasize that there are
> more categories). While I believe that in-person meetings will become
> the norm again in a reasonably near future, 2021 seems a bit
> premature to me.

Well, this is why Plumbers and Kernel Summit are fully virtual for this
year, so you won't miss any content.  The idea of meetups is just to
test the water for restarting the social side.  In 2021 it's
necessarily going to be governed by which country is on which other
country's friends list, but hopefully that won't be the case in 2022.

> If we want to brainstorm alternate solutions, an option could be to
> split the monolithic conference location into a small set of
> geographically distributed groups (assuming local travel would be
> easier and generally seen as an accepted solution compared to
> intercontinental travels) and link those through video conferencing.
> I don't have high hopes that this would be feasible in practice given
> the increase in efforts and costs to organize multiple locations in
> parallel, but maybe something interesting could come out of
> discussing different options.

Remember, remote isn't always the best solution either.  We got
complaints last year that we were disadvantaging people without high
speed internet by using video (i.e. large swathes of Africa and Asia). 
In a physical conference we can try to counteract this disadvantage by
offering attendance sponsorship, but I can't sponsor a fibre connection
on a continental scale.  I think we need to feel our way here, and
trying out meetups for size (which are traditionally more
geographically local) could be one way to do this.

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi James,

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 09:04:29AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:55 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:44:23AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:31 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > > > On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:27:44AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > > > Well, I'm not going to get into a debate over the effectiveness
> > > > > of the current vaccines.  I will say that all conferences have
> > > > > to now recognize that a sizeable proportion of former attendees
> > > > > will have fears about travelling and therefore remote
> > > > > components are going to be a fixture of conferences going
> > > > > forward.
> > > > > 
> > > > > However, while we should accommodate them, we can't let these
> > > > > fears override people willing to take the risk and meet in
> > > > > person.
> > > > 
> > > > The interesting question is how we'll make sure that those people
> > > > will not be de facto excluded from the community, or end up as
> > > > second-class citizens.
> > > 
> > > Before the pandemic, there was a small contingent who refused to
> > > fly for various reasons.  We did sort of accommodate that by
> > > rotating the conference to Europe where more people could come in
> > > by train (like they did in Lisbon) but we didn't govern the whole
> > > conference by trying to make aerophobes first class citizens.
> > > 
> > > The bottom line is that as long as enough people are willing to
> > > meet in person and in-person delivers more value that remote (even
> > > though we'll try to make remote as valuable as possible) we should
> > > do it.   We should not handicap the desires of the one group by the
> > > fears of the other because that's a false equality ... it's
> > > reducing everyone to the level of the lowest common denominator
> > > rather than trying to elevate people.
> > 
> > This should take into account the size of each group, and I believe
> > even then it won't be a binary decision, there's lots of variation in
> > local situations, creating more than just two groups of
> > coward/careless people (let's not debate those two words if possible,
> > they're not meant to insult anyway, but to emphasize that there are
> > more categories). While I believe that in-person meetings will become
> > the norm again in a reasonably near future, 2021 seems a bit
> > premature to me.
> 
> Well, this is why Plumbers and Kernel Summit are fully virtual for this
> year, so you won't miss any content.  The idea of meetups is just to
> test the water for restarting the social side.  In 2021 it's
> necessarily going to be governed by which country is on which other
> country's friends list, but hopefully that won't be the case in 2022.

I seem to have misunderstood the original intent (or your intent at
least) and thought the proposal was to reconsider the virtual conference
for 2021 and go fully physical. Apologies for the misunderstanding if it
was indeed one. Dreaming of having good meals in good company again
doesn't make me bitter enough to claim that if I can't have them this
year, nobody can :-)

> > If we want to brainstorm alternate solutions, an option could be to
> > split the monolithic conference location into a small set of
> > geographically distributed groups (assuming local travel would be
> > easier and generally seen as an accepted solution compared to
> > intercontinental travels) and link those through video conferencing.
> > I don't have high hopes that this would be feasible in practice given
> > the increase in efforts and costs to organize multiple locations in
> > parallel, but maybe something interesting could come out of
> > discussing different options.
> 
> Remember, remote isn't always the best solution either.  We got
> complaints last year that we were disadvantaging people without high
> speed internet by using video (i.e. large swathes of Africa and Asia). 
> In a physical conference we can try to counteract this disadvantage by
> offering attendance sponsorship, but I can't sponsor a fibre connection
> on a continental scale.  I think we need to feel our way here, and
> trying out meetups for size (which are traditionally more
> geographically local) could be one way to do this.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[David Hildenbrand]

On 28.05.21 16:58, James Bottomley wrote:
> On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
>> On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>>> On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
>>>> discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
>>>> Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
>>>> year,
>>>
>>> Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
>>>
>>
>> Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the world
>> are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(
> 
> The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
> people younger than me are already vaccinated. 

And I know people younger than you in Germany personally ( ;) ) that are 
not vaccinated yet and might not even get the first shot before 
September, not even dreaming about a second one + waiting until the 
vaccine is fully in effect.

So yes, sure, nobody can stop people that think the pandemic is over 
("we are vaccinated") from meeting in person. Just make sure to not 
ignore the poor souls that really won't be traveling this year, because 
"we are not vaccinated".

-- 
Thanks,

David / dhildenb

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Wed, 2021-06-09 at 12:37 +0200, David Hildenbrand wrote:
> On 28.05.21 16:58, James Bottomley wrote:
> > On Thu, 2021-05-27 at 15:29 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> > > On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:23:03PM +0200, Christoph Lameter
> > > wrote:
> > > > On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > I know we're all really hungry for some in-person meetups and
> > > > > discussions, but at least for LPC, Kernel Summit, and
> > > > > Maintainer's Summit, we're going to have to wait for another
> > > > > year,
> > > > 
> > > > Well now that we are vaccinated: Can we still change it?
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Speak for yourself, remember that Europe and other parts of the
> > > world are not as "flush" with vaccines as the US currently is :(
> > 
> > The rollout is accelerating in Europe.  At least in Germany, I know
> > people younger than me are already vaccinated. 
> 
> And I know people younger than you in Germany personally ( ;) ) that
> are not vaccinated yet and might not even get the first shot before 
> September, not even dreaming about a second one + waiting until the 
> vaccine is fully in effect.

I said "is accelerating" not "is on a par with the US and UK".

> So yes, sure, nobody can stop people that think the pandemic is over 
> ("we are vaccinated") from meeting in person. Just make sure to not 
> ignore the poor souls that really won't be traveling this year,
> because "we are not vaccinated".

I realise the UK government attitude is that everyone should suffer
until we say it's over (mainly, it must be admitted, to try to keep
people from asking awkward questions about what went wrong initially)
and to some extent the EU shares that, but the US is definitely moving
to a regime that says once you're vaccinated it's pretty much over for
you and I don't see a problem with taking advantage of that for hybrid
style events.  However, even with the best will in the world, I can't
see much of a way around the problem that remote people at hybrid
events will always be at a disadvantage ... suggestions for improving
this are always welcome.

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Shuah Khan]

On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300
> Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> wrote:
> 
>> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
>> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of conferences, by
>> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. This is
>> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the conference
>> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
>> equipment than usual ?
> 
> I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
> understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
> is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
> "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is going
> on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
> you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
> will just destroy the conference IMO.
> 
> That said, I think we should add more to make the communication better
> for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
> followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
> attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
> have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
> beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a discussion
> with the remote attendees.
> 
> The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees can
> at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
> video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where they
> can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
> 

You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
without restricting in-person experience.

- Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
   remote participants to chime in and participate.
- Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
   enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.

It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.

thanks,
-- Shuah

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 13:55:23 -0600
Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
> without restricting in-person experience.
> 
> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
>    remote participants to chime in and participate.
> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
>    enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
> 
> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.

I have no problem with the above suggestion, and I envision that this
may be the norm going forward. What is still missing is the
interactions of the hallway track and the evening events. I was
thinking about how we could get the remote folks in on what happened
there right afterward, which is why I'm suggesting breakout rooms like
Laurent suggested as well, but at the end of the conference, and
perhaps the conversations of the previous night could continue with a
remote presence.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 04:02:46PM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 13:55:23 -0600
> Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
> > participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
> > couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
> > without restricting in-person experience.
> > 
> > - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
> >    remote participants to chime in and participate.
> > - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
> >    enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
> > 
> > It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
> > sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.
> 
> I have no problem with the above suggestion, and I envision that this
> may be the norm going forward. What is still missing is the
> interactions of the hallway track and the evening events. I was
> thinking about how we could get the remote folks in on what happened
> there right afterward, which is why I'm suggesting breakout rooms like
> Laurent suggested as well, but at the end of the conference, and
> perhaps the conversations of the previous night could continue with a
> remote presence.

It's relatively common for in-person attendees at conferences to
use instant messaging platforms (whether it be IRC, twitter, Slack or
something else) to share their opinion on something the speaker just said
in a rather less disruptive way than shouting out in the middle of a talk.
If you sit at the back of a talk, most attendees have their laptops open
and at least one chat program running.

Perhaps we could actually _enhance_ conferences by forbidding
direct audience questions and having a moderator select questions /
"more of a comment actually" from an official live chat platform to
engage the speaker directly on stage.  It would segue naturally into
"the speaker is now done with their presentation and here's some good
followup discussion".  So many times people have come up to me after
a presentation and asked a question that I really wish I could have
answered for everybody there.

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:20:50 +0100
Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:

> Perhaps we could actually _enhance_ conferences by forbidding
> direct audience questions and having a moderator select questions /
> "more of a comment actually" from an official live chat platform to
> engage the speaker directly on stage.  It would segue naturally into
> "the speaker is now done with their presentation and here's some good
> followup discussion".  So many times people have come up to me after
> a presentation and asked a question that I really wish I could have
> answered for everybody there.

For presentations, I think this is a very good idea. But it wouldn't
work for a BoF or a microconference.

I also thought about doing this for a presentations. That is, "Please
submit all questions online, and the presenter will answer them".

Of course, if you have someone that didn't bring their laptop or phone
(there are people that do that too). They should have a way to submit a
question as well. Perhaps instead of going in line to a microphone, go
in line to a public laptop to type in your question.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 11.06.21 13:10, David Howells wrote:

> One thing that concerns me about flying to the US is going through multiple
> busy international airports - take Heathrow which didn't separate incoming
> travellers from red-listed countries from those of amber- or green- until like
> a week ago.
> 
> Would it be practical/economical to charter a plane to fly, say, from a less
> busy airport in Europe to a less busy airport in the US and back again if we
> could get enough delegates together to make it worthwhile?

Wouldn't just taking prophylatic meds like CDS or HCQ and/or hi-dose
vitamins (C, D3+K2) be way more cost effective and flexible than to
charter a whole plane ?

Don't have personal experience w/ HCQ yet, but CDS is pretty cheap and
easy to use (prescription free). Of course, one should dig a bit into
the specialist literature, before playing around - and take a few days
for finding the right personal dose. especially when one's cumbered w/ 
parasites (herxheimer)


--mtx

-- 
---
Hinweis: unverschlüsselte E-Mails können leicht abgehört und manipuliert
werden ! Für eine vertrauliche Kommunikation senden Sie bitte ihren
GPG/PGP-Schlüssel zu.
---
Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info@metux.net -- +49-151-27565287

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 08:23:55PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> On 11.06.21 13:10, David Howells wrote:
> 
> > One thing that concerns me about flying to the US is going through multiple
> > busy international airports - take Heathrow which didn't separate incoming
> > travellers from red-listed countries from those of amber- or green- until like
> > a week ago.
> > 
> > Would it be practical/economical to charter a plane to fly, say, from a less
> > busy airport in Europe to a less busy airport in the US and back again if we
> > could get enough delegates together to make it worthwhile?
> 
> Wouldn't just taking prophylatic meds like CDS or HCQ and/or hi-dose
> vitamins (C, D3+K2) be way more cost effective and flexible than to
> charter a whole plane ?

Why don't you just shine a bright light up your arse?  It'll have the
same effect.

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 07:30:00PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > Wouldn't just taking prophylatic meds like CDS or HCQ and/or hi-dose
> > vitamins (C, D3+K2) be way more cost effective and flexible than to
> > charter a whole plane ?
> 
> Why don't you just shine a bright light up your arse?  It'll have the
> same effect.

Please stop.

I do not have ability to ban people across all cc'd lists, but I will for sure
start adding people to block filters on the infra to which I have access if
this wildly off-topic discussion continues and especially if things continue
to deteriorate into name-calling.

-K

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 07:30:00PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 08:23:55PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> > On 11.06.21 13:10, David Howells wrote:
> > 
> > > One thing that concerns me about flying to the US is going through multiple
> > > busy international airports - take Heathrow which didn't separate incoming
> > > travellers from red-listed countries from those of amber- or green- until like
> > > a week ago.
> > > 
> > > Would it be practical/economical to charter a plane to fly, say, from a less
> > > busy airport in Europe to a less busy airport in the US and back again if we
> > > could get enough delegates together to make it worthwhile?
> > 
> > Wouldn't just taking prophylatic meds like CDS or HCQ and/or hi-dose
> > vitamins (C, D3+K2) be way more cost effective and flexible than to
> > charter a whole plane ?
> 
> Why don't you just shine a bright light up your arse?  It'll have the
> same effect.

Could we please, as requested early on by Konstantin, restrict
COVID19-related discussions on this mailing list solely to how it would
impact travel to/from the conference ?

For those who want to debate the merits of various medicines, feel free
to create your own mailing list, or an IRC channel on Freenode.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 09.06.21 12:37, David Hildenbrand wrote:

> Just make sure to not
> ignore the poor souls that really won't be traveling this year, because
> "we are not vaccinated".

That's NOT correct.

People can't travel freely because OPPRESSIVE regimes all around the
world forbid traveling freely - and enforcing that with brute force.

Last year, i've been gunpointed by a cop just for walking over a market
place in Nuremberg with my family, wearing a shirt with some Tucholsky
quote and having my hands in the pants pockets !

It is NOT the unvaxed who are stopping anybody from travel - it is
nobody else than the GOVERMENT and its compliant abettors.

US americans should remind themselves of the 2nd amendment.


--mtx

-- 
---
Hinweis: unverschlüsselte E-Mails können leicht abgehört und manipuliert
werden ! Für eine vertrauliche Kommunikation senden Sie bitte ihren
GPG/PGP-Schlüssel zu.
---
Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info@metux.net -- +49-151-27565287

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Shuah,

On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:55:23PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
> On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > 
> >> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
> >> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of conferences, by
> >> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. This is
> >> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the conference
> >> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
> >> equipment than usual ?
> > 
> > I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
> > understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
> > is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
> > "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is going
> > on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
> > you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
> > will just destroy the conference IMO.
> > 
> > That said, I think we should add more to make the communication better
> > for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
> > followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
> > attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
> > have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
> > beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a discussion
> > with the remote attendees.
> > 
> > The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees can
> > at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
> > video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where they
> > can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
> > 
> 
> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
> without restricting in-person experience.
> 
> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
>    remote participants to chime in and participate.
> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
>    enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
> 
> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.

A moderator to watch online chat and relay questions is I believe very
good for presentations, it's hard for a presenter to keep an eye on a
screen while having to manage the interaction with the audience in the
room (there's the usual joke of the difference between an introvert and
an extrovert open-source developer is that the extrovert looks at *your*
shoes when talking to you, but in many presentations the speaker
nowadays does a fairly good job as watching the audience, at least from
time to time :-)).

For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier to
participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking in
microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need to
enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a larger
number of microphones in the room than usual.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 15:34:19 +0200
"Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <lkml@metux.net> wrote:

> US americans should remind themselves of the 2nd amendment.

This is not the place to have this discussion. Please stop.

You are an active kernel developer, you should know better. Continuing this
line of conversation will only guarantee that you will be placed in the
/dev/null folder of many developers procmailrc filters.

You will be for me, if you decide to continue this.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:46 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier
> to participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking
> in microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need
> to enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a
> larger number of microphones in the room than usual.

Plumbers has been pretty good at that.  Even before remote
participation, if people don't speak into the mic, it's not captured on
the recording, so we've spent ages developing protocols for this. 
Mostly centred around having someone in the room to remind everyone to
speak into the mic and easily throwable padded mic boxes.  Ironically,
this is the detail that meant we couldn't hold Plumbers in person under
the current hotel protocols ... the mic needs sanitizing after each
throw.

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 07:11:44 -0700
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:46 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier
> > to participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking
> > in microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need
> > to enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a
> > larger number of microphones in the room than usual.  
> 
> Plumbers has been pretty good at that.  Even before remote
> participation, if people don't speak into the mic, it's not captured on
> the recording, so we've spent ages developing protocols for this. 
> Mostly centred around having someone in the room to remind everyone to
> speak into the mic and easily throwable padded mic boxes.  Ironically,
> this is the detail that meant we couldn't hold Plumbers in person under
> the current hotel protocols ... the mic needs sanitizing after each
> throw.
>

Plumbers also has the advantage of having a throwable mic. And not just
one of them, we have two and a normal mic as well as a lavalier mic.

Having someone running around the audience passing the mic is not very
efficient, and having to get up and stand at a microphone, may be too
intimidating for some.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 4:11 PM James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:46 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier
> > to participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking
> > in microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need
> > to enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a
> > larger number of microphones in the room than usual.
>
> Plumbers has been pretty good at that.  Even before remote
> participation, if people don't speak into the mic, it's not captured on
> the recording, so we've spent ages developing protocols for this.
> Mostly centred around having someone in the room to remind everyone to
> speak into the mic and easily throwable padded mic boxes.  Ironically,
> this is the detail that meant we couldn't hold Plumbers in person under
> the current hotel protocols ... the mic needs sanitizing after each
> throw.

What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
carrying, i.e. a phone?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200
Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> carrying, i.e. a phone?

Interesting idea.

I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
enough to prevent echo?

It is something that needs to be tested out first before making it
officially used.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 10:32:14AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200 Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> 
> > What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> > carrying, i.e. a phone?
> 
> Interesting idea.
> 
> I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
> enough to prevent echo?

That could be solved by isolating attendees in different rooms. That way
people could even attend remotely. Oh, wait... :-)

> It is something that needs to be tested out first before making it
> officially used.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[James Bottomley]

On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:28 +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 4:11 PM James Bottomley
> <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 16:46 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > > For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest
> > > barrier to participation for remote attendees is local attendees
> > > not speaking in microphones. That's the number one rule that
> > > moderators would need to enforce, I think all the rest depends on
> > > it. This may require a larger number of microphones in the room
> > > than usual.
> > 
> > Plumbers has been pretty good at that.  Even before remote
> > participation, if people don't speak into the mic, it's not
> > captured on the recording, so we've spent ages developing protocols
> > for this. Mostly centred around having someone in the room to
> > remind everyone to speak into the mic and easily throwable padded
> > mic boxes.  Ironically, this is the detail that meant we couldn't
> > hold Plumbers in person under the current hotel protocols ... the
> > mic needs sanitizing after each throw.
> 
> What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> carrying, i.e. a phone?

Well, you can already in our hybrid plan:  BBB works on a phone as a
web app, so you'd appear in the conference as a remote attendee even
though you're sitting in the room.  However, not everyone's phone will
run the app, so we still need the throwable solution.

The main problem with using this method is that you're going to have to
mute the phone speaker output to prevent audio feedback, but I'm sure
we'll only get that wrong a few times before people work it out ...

James

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

Hi Steven,

On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 4:32 PM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200
> Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
>
> > What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> > carrying, i.e. a phone?
>
> Interesting idea.
>
> I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
> enough to prevent echo?

I deliberately didn't say anything about a speaker ;-)

Just use the mic, with a simple (web) app only doing audio input?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Matthew Wilcox]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 04:58:08PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> Hi Steven,
> 
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 4:32 PM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200
> > Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> >
> > > What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> > > carrying, i.e. a phone?
> >
> > Interesting idea.
> >
> > I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
> > enough to prevent echo?
> 
> I deliberately didn't say anything about a speaker ;-)

There's usually a speaker in the room so everyone can hear the question
...

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:14:26 +0100
Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:

> > I deliberately didn't say anything about a speaker ;-)  
> 
> There's usually a speaker in the room so everyone can hear the question
> ...

Right, that's what I was thinking. Not the phone having a speaker, but
the room having one. Otherwise, remote attendees wont be able to
participate.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 5:15 PM Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 04:58:08PM +0200, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 4:32 PM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> > > On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200
> > > Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> > > > carrying, i.e. a phone?
> > >
> > > Interesting idea.
> > >
> > > I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
> > > enough to prevent echo?
> >
> > I deliberately didn't say anything about a speaker ;-)
>
> There's usually a speaker in the room so everyone can hear the question
> ...

Oh IC.  I meant that not using the speaker on the phone, there cannot
be any feedback from the phone speaker to the phone mic.

W.r.t. the other speaker in the room, isn't that similar to the normal mic,
and can't that be handled at the receiving side?
There will be a bit more delay involved, though.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 17:29:04 +0200
Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> W.r.t. the other speaker in the room, isn't that similar to the normal mic,
> and can't that be handled at the receiving side?
> There will be a bit more delay involved, though.

How many times have you been in a conference where the normal mic and
speaker caused a nasty feedback loop?

I'm not sure how well phone mics and room speakers will work.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 11:34:52 -0400
Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:

> How many times have you been in a conference where the normal mic and
> speaker caused a nasty feedback loop?
> 
> I'm not sure how well phone mics and room speakers will work.

BTW, Don't take these criticisms as a rejection of your idea. I
actually like the idea. But to implement it, we need to go through all
the scenarios that will likely go wrong, if we want it to work.

-- Steve

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Mark Brown]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 771 bytes --]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 10:32:14AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200
> Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> > What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> > carrying, i.e. a phone?

> Interesting idea.

> I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
> enough to prevent echo?

Unless you get the latency for the WebRTC<->in room speaker down lower
than I'd expect it to be I'd expect echo cancellation to have fun,
though beam forming might reject a lot of in room noise including that -
higher end modern phones are astonishingly good at this stuff.  I'd not
trust it to work reliably for all attendees though, it's the sort of
thing where you'll get lots of per device variation.

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 488 bytes --]

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

Em Fri, 18 Jun 2021 11:34:52 -0400
Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> escreveu:

> On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 17:29:04 +0200
> Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> 
> > W.r.t. the other speaker in the room, isn't that similar to the normal mic,
> > and can't that be handled at the receiving side?
> > There will be a bit more delay involved, though.  
> 
> How many times have you been in a conference where the normal mic and
> speaker caused a nasty feedback loop?

I never used, but there are some devices that can work as automatic feedback 
suppressors. They basically detect a feedback loop and add notch filter(s) to
the frequency(ies) that are looping. Some high-end digital mixers have this
feature embedded (but the operator may need to enable it).

Yet, you may still hear the feedback loop while the algorithm is detecting 
and correcting the issue, as it takes 100 ms to 400ms to detect and filter
a single feedback frequency.

> I'm not sure how well phone mics and room speakers will work.

I guess that this depends on how the environment is setup. A good
digital mixer can be set with a gate threshold. If the volume is below
the threshold, the mic will be muted. 

They can also be setup to have just one microphone group, where only
one microphone will have the volume raised on a given time. So, if
someone speaks on a mic, all the others are muted or attenuated.

Yet, I guess this is not the usual "package" provided by hotels.
Those setups may require extra devices and technical people that
knows now to use such features.

Thanks,
Mauro

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Mauro Carvalho Chehab]

Em Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:58:29 +0100
Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org> escreveu:

> On Fri, Jun 18, 2021 at 10:32:14AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 16:28:02 +0200
> > Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:  
> 
> > > What about letting people use the personal mic they're already
> > > carrying, i.e. a phone?  
> 
> > Interesting idea.  
> 
> > I wonder how well that would work in practice. Are all phones good
> > enough to prevent echo?  
> 
> Unless you get the latency for the WebRTC<->in room speaker down lower
> than I'd expect it to be I'd expect echo cancellation to have fun,
> though beam forming might reject a lot of in room noise including that -
> higher end modern phones are astonishingly good at this stuff.  I'd not
> trust it to work reliably for all attendees though, it's the sort of
> thing where you'll get lots of per device variation.

The local audience should be listening to the in-room audio, in order
to avoid echo. Also, all local mics should be muted, if someone is 
speaking from a remote location. 

Yet, echo is unavoidable if a remote participant is speaking while 
listening to the audio without headphones. If this ever happens, I
guess the moderator should cut the remote audio and ask the remote
participant to lower their speakers or use a headphone.


Thanks,
Mauro

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Shuah Khan]

On 6/18/21 7:46 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hi Shuah,
> 
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:55:23PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
>> On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>>> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>>
>>>> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
>>>> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of conferences, by
>>>> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. This is
>>>> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the conference
>>>> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
>>>> equipment than usual ?
>>>
>>> I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
>>> understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
>>> is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
>>> "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is going
>>> on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
>>> you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
>>> will just destroy the conference IMO.
>>>
>>> That said, I think we should add more to make the communication better
>>> for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
>>> followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
>>> attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
>>> have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
>>> beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a discussion
>>> with the remote attendees.
>>>
>>> The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees can
>>> at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
>>> video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where they
>>> can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
>>>
>>
>> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
>> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
>> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
>> without restricting in-person experience.
>>
>> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
>>     remote participants to chime in and participate.
>> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
>>     enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
>>
>> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
>> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.
> 
> A moderator to watch online chat and relay questions is I believe very
> good for presentations, it's hard for a presenter to keep an eye on a
> screen while having to manage the interaction with the audience in the
> room (there's the usual joke of the difference between an introvert and
> an extrovert open-source developer is that the extrovert looks at *your*
> shoes when talking to you, but in many presentations the speaker
> nowadays does a fairly good job as watching the audience, at least from
> time to time :-)).
> 
> For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier to
> participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking in
> microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need to
> enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a larger
> number of microphones in the room than usual.
> 

Absolutely. Moderator has to make sure the following things happen for
this to be effective:

- Watch chat and Q&A, Raise hand from remote participants
- Enforce some kind of taking turns to allow fairness in
   participation
- Have the speaker repeat questions asked in the room (we do that now
   in some talks - both remote and in-person - chat and Q&A needs
   reading out for recording)
- Explore live Transcription features available in the virtual conf.
   platform. You still need humans watching the transcription.
- Have a running session notes combined with transcription.

Any of these options aren't sustainable when large number of people
are participating remotely or in-person. In general a small number of
people participate either in person or remote in any case, based on
my observation in remote and in-person settings.

Maybe we can experiment with one or two workshops this time around
and see how it works out. If we can figure an effective way, it would
be beneficial for people that can't travel for one reason or the
other.

thanks,
-- Shuah

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Shuah,

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 04:33:22PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
> On 6/18/21 7:46 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:55:23PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
> >> On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> >>> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
> >>>> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of conferences, by
> >>>> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. This is
> >>>> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the conference
> >>>> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
> >>>> equipment than usual ?
> >>>
> >>> I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
> >>> understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
> >>> is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
> >>> "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is going
> >>> on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
> >>> you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
> >>> will just destroy the conference IMO.
> >>>
> >>> That said, I think we should add more to make the communication better
> >>> for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
> >>> followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
> >>> attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
> >>> have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
> >>> beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a discussion
> >>> with the remote attendees.
> >>>
> >>> The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees can
> >>> at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
> >>> video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where they
> >>> can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
> >>>
> >>
> >> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
> >> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
> >> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
> >> without restricting in-person experience.
> >>
> >> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
> >>     remote participants to chime in and participate.
> >> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
> >>     enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
> >>
> >> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
> >> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.
> > 
> > A moderator to watch online chat and relay questions is I believe very
> > good for presentations, it's hard for a presenter to keep an eye on a
> > screen while having to manage the interaction with the audience in the
> > room (there's the usual joke of the difference between an introvert and
> > an extrovert open-source developer is that the extrovert looks at *your*
> > shoes when talking to you, but in many presentations the speaker
> > nowadays does a fairly good job as watching the audience, at least from
> > time to time :-)).
> > 
> > For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier to
> > participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking in
> > microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need to
> > enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a larger
> > number of microphones in the room than usual.
> > 
> 
> Absolutely. Moderator has to make sure the following things happen for
> this to be effective:
> 
> - Watch chat and Q&A, Raise hand from remote participants
> - Enforce some kind of taking turns to allow fairness in
>    participation
> - Have the speaker repeat questions asked in the room (we do that now
>    in some talks - both remote and in-person - chat and Q&A needs
>    reading out for recording)
> - Explore live Transcription features available in the virtual conf.
>    platform. You still need humans watching the transcription.
> - Have a running session notes combined with transcription.
> 
> Any of these options aren't sustainable when large number of people
> are participating remotely or in-person. In general a small number of
> people participate either in person or remote in any case, based on
> my observation in remote and in-person settings.
> 
> Maybe we can experiment with one or two workshops this time around
> and see how it works out. If we can figure an effective way, it would
> be beneficial for people that can't travel for one reason or the
> other.

Can we nominate moderators ahead of time ? For workshop-style
discussions, they need to be a person who won't participate actively in
the discussions, as it's impossible to both contribute and moderate at
the same time.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Shuah Khan]

On 6/22/21 4:59 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hi Shuah,
> 
> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 04:33:22PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
>> On 6/18/21 7:46 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:55:23PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
>>>> On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>>>>> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
>>>>>> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of conferences, by
>>>>>> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. This is
>>>>>> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the conference
>>>>>> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
>>>>>> equipment than usual ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
>>>>> understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
>>>>> is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
>>>>> "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is going
>>>>> on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
>>>>> you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
>>>>> will just destroy the conference IMO.
>>>>>
>>>>> That said, I think we should add more to make the communication better
>>>>> for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
>>>>> followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
>>>>> attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
>>>>> have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
>>>>> beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a discussion
>>>>> with the remote attendees.
>>>>>
>>>>> The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees can
>>>>> at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
>>>>> video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where they
>>>>> can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
>>>> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
>>>> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
>>>> without restricting in-person experience.
>>>>
>>>> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
>>>>      remote participants to chime in and participate.
>>>> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
>>>>      enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
>>>>
>>>> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
>>>> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.
>>>
>>> A moderator to watch online chat and relay questions is I believe very
>>> good for presentations, it's hard for a presenter to keep an eye on a
>>> screen while having to manage the interaction with the audience in the
>>> room (there's the usual joke of the difference between an introvert and
>>> an extrovert open-source developer is that the extrovert looks at *your*
>>> shoes when talking to you, but in many presentations the speaker
>>> nowadays does a fairly good job as watching the audience, at least from
>>> time to time :-)).
>>>
>>> For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier to
>>> participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking in
>>> microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need to
>>> enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a larger
>>> number of microphones in the room than usual.
>>>
>>
>> Absolutely. Moderator has to make sure the following things happen for
>> this to be effective:
>>
>> - Watch chat and Q&A, Raise hand from remote participants
>> - Enforce some kind of taking turns to allow fairness in
>>     participation
>> - Have the speaker repeat questions asked in the room (we do that now
>>     in some talks - both remote and in-person - chat and Q&A needs
>>     reading out for recording)
>> - Explore live Transcription features available in the virtual conf.
>>     platform. You still need humans watching the transcription.
>> - Have a running session notes combined with transcription.
>>
>> Any of these options aren't sustainable when large number of people
>> are participating remotely or in-person. In general a small number of
>> people participate either in person or remote in any case, based on
>> my observation in remote and in-person settings.
>>
>> Maybe we can experiment with one or two workshops this time around
>> and see how it works out. If we can figure an effective way, it would
>> be beneficial for people that can't travel for one reason or the
>> other.
> 
> Can we nominate moderators ahead of time ? For workshop-style
> discussions, they need to be a person who won't participate actively in
> the discussions, as it's impossible to both contribute and moderate at
> the same time.
> 

Correct. It will be impossible to participate and moderate in workshop
setting. We have to ask for volunteers and nominate moderators ahead of
time.

thanks,
-- Shuah

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Shuah Khan]

On 6/22/21 5:33 PM, Shuah Khan wrote:
> On 6/22/21 4:59 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>> Hi Shuah,
>>
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 04:33:22PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
>>> On 6/18/21 7:46 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:55:23PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
>>>>> On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
>>>>>>> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of 
>>>>>>> conferences, by
>>>>>>> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. 
>>>>>>> This is
>>>>>>> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the 
>>>>>>> conference
>>>>>>> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
>>>>>>> equipment than usual ?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
>>>>>> understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
>>>>>> is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
>>>>>> "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is 
>>>>>> going
>>>>>> on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
>>>>>> you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
>>>>>> will just destroy the conference IMO.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> That said, I think we should add more to make the communication 
>>>>>> better
>>>>>> for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
>>>>>> followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
>>>>>> attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
>>>>>> have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
>>>>>> beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a 
>>>>>> discussion
>>>>>> with the remote attendees.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees 
>>>>>> can
>>>>>> at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
>>>>>> video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where 
>>>>>> they
>>>>>> can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
>>>>> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
>>>>> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
>>>>> without restricting in-person experience.
>>>>>
>>>>> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to 
>>>>> enable
>>>>>      remote participants to chime in and participate.
>>>>> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go 
>>>>> unnoticed and
>>>>>      enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in 
>>>>> person.
>>>>>
>>>>> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
>>>>> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.
>>>>
>>>> A moderator to watch online chat and relay questions is I believe very
>>>> good for presentations, it's hard for a presenter to keep an eye on a
>>>> screen while having to manage the interaction with the audience in the
>>>> room (there's the usual joke of the difference between an introvert and
>>>> an extrovert open-source developer is that the extrovert looks at 
>>>> *your*
>>>> shoes when talking to you, but in many presentations the speaker
>>>> nowadays does a fairly good job as watching the audience, at least from
>>>> time to time :-)).
>>>>
>>>> For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier to
>>>> participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking in
>>>> microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need to
>>>> enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a larger
>>>> number of microphones in the room than usual.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Absolutely. Moderator has to make sure the following things happen for
>>> this to be effective:
>>>
>>> - Watch chat and Q&A, Raise hand from remote participants
>>> - Enforce some kind of taking turns to allow fairness in
>>>     participation
>>> - Have the speaker repeat questions asked in the room (we do that now
>>>     in some talks - both remote and in-person - chat and Q&A needs
>>>     reading out for recording)
>>> - Explore live Transcription features available in the virtual conf.
>>>     platform. You still need humans watching the transcription.
>>> - Have a running session notes combined with transcription.
>>>
>>> Any of these options aren't sustainable when large number of people
>>> are participating remotely or in-person. In general a small number of
>>> people participate either in person or remote in any case, based on
>>> my observation in remote and in-person settings.
>>>
>>> Maybe we can experiment with one or two workshops this time around
>>> and see how it works out. If we can figure an effective way, it would
>>> be beneficial for people that can't travel for one reason or the
>>> other.
>>
>> Can we nominate moderators ahead of time ? For workshop-style
>> discussions, they need to be a person who won't participate actively in
>> the discussions, as it's impossible to both contribute and moderate at
>> the same time.
>>
> 
> Correct. It will be impossible to participate and moderate in workshop
> setting. We have to ask for volunteers and nominate moderators ahead of
> time.
> 

Subsystems could seek volunteers from other subsystems perhaps ...

thanks,
-- Shuah

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Laurent Pinchart]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 05:57:11PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
> On 6/22/21 5:33 PM, Shuah Khan wrote:
> > On 6/22/21 4:59 PM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> >> On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 04:33:22PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
> >>> On 6/18/21 7:46 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> >>>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:55:23PM -0600, Shuah Khan wrote:
> >>>>> On 6/10/21 1:26 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> >>>>>> On Thu, 10 Jun 2021 21:39:49 +0300 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>> There will always be more informal discussions between on-site
> >>>>>>> participants. After all, this is one of the benefits of conferences, by
> >>>>>>> being all together we can easily organize ad-hoc discussions. This is
> >>>>>>> traditionally done by finding a not too noisy corner in the conference
> >>>>>>> center, would it be useful to have more break-out rooms with A/V
> >>>>>>> equipment than usual ?
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> I've been giving this quite some thought too, and I've come to the
> >>>>>> understanding (and sure I can be wrong, but I don't think that I am),
> >>>>>> is that when doing a hybrid event, the remote people will always be
> >>>>>> "second class citizens" with respect to the communication that is going
> >>>>>> on. Saying that we can make it the same is not going to happen unless
> >>>>>> you start restricting what people can do that are present, and that
> >>>>>> will just destroy the conference IMO.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> That said, I think we should add more to make the communication better
> >>>>>> for those that are not present. Maybe an idea is to have break outs
> >>>>>> followed by the presentation and evening events that include remote
> >>>>>> attendees to discuss with those that are there about what they might
> >>>>>> have missed. Have incentives at these break outs (free stacks and
> >>>>>> beer?) to encourage the live attendees to attend and have a discussion
> >>>>>> with the remote attendees.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> The presentations would have remote access, where remote attendees can
> >>>>>> at the very least write in some chat their questions or comments. If
> >>>>>> video and connectivity is good enough, perhaps have a screen where they
> >>>>>> can show up and talk, but that may have logistical limitations.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> You are absolutely right that the remote people will have a hard time
> >>>>> participating and keeping up with in-person participants. I have a
> >>>>> couple of ideas on how we might be able to improve remote experience
> >>>>> without restricting in-person experience.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> - Have one or two moderators per session to watch chat and Q&A to enable
> >>>>>      remote participants to chime in and participate.
> >>>>> - Moderators can make sure remote participation doesn't go unnoticed and
> >>>>>      enable taking turns for remote vs. people participating in person.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> It will be change in the way we interact in all in-person sessions for
> >>>>> sure, however it might enhance the experience for remote attendees.
> >>>>
> >>>> A moderator to watch online chat and relay questions is I believe very
> >>>> good for presentations, it's hard for a presenter to keep an eye on a
> >>>> screen while having to manage the interaction with the audience in the
> >>>> room (there's the usual joke of the difference between an introvert and
> >>>> an extrovert open-source developer is that the extrovert looks at *your*
> >>>> shoes when talking to you, but in many presentations the speaker
> >>>> nowadays does a fairly good job as watching the audience, at least from
> >>>> time to time :-)).
> >>>>
> >>>> For workshop or brainstorming types of sessions, the highest barrier to
> >>>> participation for remote attendees is local attendees not speaking in
> >>>> microphones. That's the number one rule that moderators would need to
> >>>> enforce, I think all the rest depends on it. This may require a larger
> >>>> number of microphones in the room than usual.
> >>>
> >>> Absolutely. Moderator has to make sure the following things happen for
> >>> this to be effective:
> >>>
> >>> - Watch chat and Q&A, Raise hand from remote participants
> >>> - Enforce some kind of taking turns to allow fairness in
> >>>     participation
> >>> - Have the speaker repeat questions asked in the room (we do that now
> >>>     in some talks - both remote and in-person - chat and Q&A needs
> >>>     reading out for recording)
> >>> - Explore live Transcription features available in the virtual conf.
> >>>     platform. You still need humans watching the transcription.
> >>> - Have a running session notes combined with transcription.
> >>>
> >>> Any of these options aren't sustainable when large number of people
> >>> are participating remotely or in-person. In general a small number of
> >>> people participate either in person or remote in any case, based on
> >>> my observation in remote and in-person settings.
> >>>
> >>> Maybe we can experiment with one or two workshops this time around
> >>> and see how it works out. If we can figure an effective way, it would
> >>> be beneficial for people that can't travel for one reason or the
> >>> other.
> >>
> >> Can we nominate moderators ahead of time ? For workshop-style
> >> discussions, they need to be a person who won't participate actively in
> >> the discussions, as it's impossible to both contribute and moderate at
> >> the same time.
> > 
> > Correct. It will be impossible to participate and moderate in workshop
> > setting. We have to ask for volunteers and nominate moderators ahead of
> > time.
> 
> Subsystems could seek volunteers from other subsystems perhaps ...

That's a good idea, and it's a great way to learn about other parts of
the kernel (or other open-source projects). This would need to be taken
into account when scheduling workshops though. I'd like to also propose
giving official recognition of the important role of moderators, for
instance by extending the speaker's gift scheme to moderators (no
personal interest here as I won't attend the conference in person and
thus can't be a moderator, and it's an easy to make suggestion for me as
I don't manage conference budgets :-)).

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart

Re: Maintainers / Kernel Summit 2021 planning kick-off

[Steven Rostedt]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2021 17:57:11 -0600
Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

>  Correct. It will be impossible to participate and moderate in workshop
> > setting. We have to ask for volunteers and nominate moderators ahead of
> > time.
> >   
> 
> Subsystems could seek volunteers from other subsystems perhaps ...

Right, this is exactly what I was thinking. I could moderate a GPU
subsystem, and even though I'm know for speaking, I would keep my mouth
shut for such a session, as I'm totally clueless when it comes to the
GPU subsystem ;-)

-- Steve