All,
thank you for a lively discussion. I think that there's some very good ideas floating about. It's clear that we all care passionately about make Linaro Connect as good as it can possibly be. Some comments:
[1] What is the problem that we're trying to solve? It is, in my view, is trying to ensure that everyone important to each discussion is able to be there so that the right decisions take place
- I saw some clashes at the last event where meetings were empty or moved so that the right people were there. I think that this was because we didn't look across the booking 'silos' before the week itself
- Linux kernel intersects most of our problem areas and that makes the kernel experts a scarce resource and a critical path on scheduling
[2] It's a slice and dice problem with most things being group based.
- I don't think that each WG needs to stay together for the morning (technical) sessions, but they do for the afternoon hacking sessions (mostly)
- Zach's point about avoiding silos is a good one
[3] We give the mandate to solve 'heavy lifting' problems to particular groups
- The graphics WG is the right 'center of gravity' for UMM, for example
- but the overlap between groups can be quite large (especially platforms which is where the technologies come together)
[4] Kiko's suggestion was to group the sessions by topic (big.LITTLE) and area (architecture) and Zach's suggestion was to have topic champion (continuous integration). Practically, some of this is already happening, for example with Amit pulling together all the big.LITTLE sessions (switcher and MP).
Here's my suggestion:
[1] Take Kiko's 'table' as the basis and transcribe it into the Connect planning spreadsheets maintained by Arwen etc. That gives us {topic, area, contents}
[2] Nominate and agree champions / engineering teams to own each topic (add two columns {champion, team}. The champions could be the TL, they could be nominated by them, they don't have to work in the team that 'owns' the topic.
[3] Have the champions own creating the sessions and ensuring that the right people (key decision makers) are signed up. In effect, one of their roles is to work across silos.
Let's leave aside how the summit tool could show a schedule by topic or whether we'd have 'topic leader' shirts made for now.
I'm happy to own [1] and support [2] and [3].
Makes sense?
Dave
David Rusling, CTO
Linaro
Lockton House
Clarendon Rd
Cambridge
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