Re: On cooperative work [Was: Re: newbus' ivar's limitation..]

On Thursday, August 02, 2012 12:30:16 am Doug Barton wrote:
> On 8/1/2012 8:36 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
> > I think this proves the point everybody has been saying: you are being 
needlessly contrary and confrontational.
> 
> Actually if you take a step back and look at what Arnaud is saying
> objectively, he's right. If anyone can attend the meeting by simply
> getting an invitation from a committer, the only purpose the invitation
> serves is to force the mere-mortal user to kiss someone's ring. That's
> precisely the kind of elitist crap that I've been railing against for so
> many years now.
> 
> OTOH, currently the dev summits generally take place with limited
> resources, so it's not really possible to have "everyone" attend. And
> (TMK) the "invitation" process is really  more like a restaurant with a
> sign that says "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."

The latter bits here are mostly true.  The biggest constraint is space.  Also, 
I don't know of anyone that has asked to attend the developer summit as a 
guest that wasn't invited.

> But on the _other_ other hand, the problem of things being discussed
> and/or decisions being taken exclusively at the dev summits, especially
> BSDCAN, has gotten quite bad over the last several years. Even amongst
> committers, the community has become divided between the "haves" who can
> travel to the summit, and the "have nots" who can't. Note, I'm quite
> sure that this statement will be met with howls of protest, from the
> "haves," that this isn't the case. Even if they were sincere, it's
> incredibly easy for the people with the privileges to see their
> privileged state as "normal," and lose sight of how the world looks from
> the cheap seats.

I find this a bit ironic from you given that I've met you in person at
USENIX ATC which is an order of magnitude more expensive than BSDCan (and
in fact, one of the reasons the US-based BSDCon died and was effectively
supplanted by BSDCan was that BSDCan is far cheaper).

> I used to ask the PTB to provide *some* form of remote participation for
> even a fraction of the events at the dev summit. I don't bother asking
> anymore because year after year my requests were met with any of:
> indifference, hostility, shrugged shoulders (that's a hard problem that
> we can't solve), or embarrassment. Since if the right people around here
> want something to happen, it happens; I finally came to the conclusion
> that they didn't want remote participation to happen, so it won't.
> That's a shame.

To be honest, the preocuppations to date have been a bit more basic than
that (figuring out a workable format, lots of effort on simple logistics
like food and rooms).  Also, in previous years we have often had breakout 
rooms in random conference rooms in what would be the equivalent of a dorm 
meeting area with no A/V equipment, etc.  The last two years have cut down to 
fewer meetings in more reasonable rooms.  The connectivity is now generally 
reliable as well.  All that to say that now that some basic things are 
settled, we can probably make some forward progress on this.  A first step 
might be to start recording the summit sessions (BSDCan already has a partner 
that does this).  Live streaming I'm less sure of, mostly because I am 
completely ignorant of what is available.  I do know that having a bunch of 
people skype in would not be feasible (not enough bandwidth to send video out 
in multiple streams).  The video would need to go out in a single stream to a 
distributor of some sort.  And, quite frankly, despite Doug's "haves" vs 
"have-nots" implications, we can't afford an expensive commercial solution 
(e.g. Cisco) AFAIK.

-- 
John Baldwin