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:

quoted

On Fri, 2021-05-28 at 18:31 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:

quoted

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 08:27:44AM -0700, James Bottomley wrote:

[...]

quoted

quoted

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