Kernel Summit Reminder: Please send topics, nominations by end of week

As a reminder, please suggest topics and nominations (including potentially self-nominations) by the end of this week, if at all possible. Also please check the nominations list:

        https://goo.gl/79tJFx

I believe have all of the nominations and e-mail address corrections sent as of this date, but if I've missed any, please let me know.

Thanks!!

- Ted

Kernel Summit Planning Kickoff
Call for Topics / Attendees

The 16th annual Kernel Summit will be held October 31st through November the 2nd, 2016, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, overlapping with the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC).

The format of the Kernel Summit will be:

* Monday: Invite-only core attendees' plenary sessions
* Tuesday: Workshops and breakout sessions (co-organized with LPC)
* Wednesday/Thursday: Technical Sessions

The Core plenary day will be focused on topics which are not appropriate for any of the subsystem-specific workshops or minisummits, and which cannot be easily resolved using the normal e-mail and IRC channels. These include issues about our overall development process and topics which span multiple subsystems.

The workshops are intended for kernel subsystem developers or the handling of other topics needing an intensive half- or full-day discussion. There will also be a room for specialized discussions that come up at the last minute, which will be scheduled in an unconference style.

The technical sessions will be open to all kernel summit attendees 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 for subsystem maintainers). The technical sessions will be taking place at the same time as LPC Miniconferences; we will take care to minimize potential conflicts

The Plumbers Conference Miniconferences will be open to Kernel Summit attendees, as will the various Plumbers social events. (Sponsors from the Kernel Summit and LPC will be co-sponsoring the reception on Wednesday evening.) Simiarly, the Kernel Summit technical sessions will be open to LPC attendees (although they will not be able to attend the invite-open sessions on Monday.)

For space reasons, we try to cap the attendance of the core plenary day to around 80-100 people. We have created an initial list of nominations for that core plenary day, based on the top 3rd or 4th percentile of commit authors or reviewers since the end of the last kernel summit. You can see that list here:

	https://goo.gl/79tJFx

Since it is a mechanically generated list, it's obviously going to be incomplete. So if you think that there are people who should be on the list, you can nominate them (self nominations are ok) by sending a note to the kernel summit discuss mailing list. Please indicate what you think they would be able to contribute by attending.

[email protected]

Please also let us know if you notice an obsolete or incorrect e-mail address on the list. You can either leave a comment on the spreadsheet, or send a note to the ksummit-pc mailing list.

As in past years, people who are the first to suggest a particularly interesting topic and/or who actively and positively engage in the discussion of those topics will get special consideration by the program committee.

If you would like to suggest a topic, please send a separate e-mail for each topic, so we can more easily track the discussion, and please tag your e-mail with [CORE TOPIC] or [TECH TOPIC] depending on whether the topic would be a better fit for the Monday sessions or the Wednesday sessions. Also include a list of people who you think would be valuable in participating in the discussion.

If possible, please send topic proposals as soon as possible so we can better coordinate with the Plumbers Conference, and certainly before July 29th, since that's about when we will start evaluating the list of potential attendees.

Obviously, if new topics come up after that, please still send them to us! For one thing, invites will be going out in stages. For another, we want to make sure the kernel summit will be as useful as possible, and so if you think there's something that the kernel community needs to consider, we'd like to know about it!

If you were not subscribed on to the kernel-discuss mailing list from last year (or if you had removed yourself after the kernel summit), you can subscribe to the discuss list using mailman:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-discuss

For reference, previous years' kernel summits were covered by LWN at:

https://lwn.net/Articles/KernelSummit2015
https://lwn.net/Articles/KernelSummit2014
https://lwn.net/Articles/KernelSummit2013

If you are interested in leading one of the workshops on Tuesday, please contact the kernel summit program committee with your proposal at:

[email protected]

The 2016 Kernel Summit Program Committee
========================================

Alan Cox
Shuah Khan
Jonathan Corbet
Greg Kroah-Hartman
Martin K. Petersen
Mel Gorman
Steven Rostedt
Paul McKenney
Theodore Ts'o
Grant Likely

Thanks for all of the nominations! I believe I've processed all of the requests to be included for consideration to attend the kernel summit, but please do take a quick peek to make sure I didn't miss you, or that I didn't fumble your e-mail address.

Also, in honor of Google's departing head of HR, Laslo Bock, I'd like to give what he called "the nudge"[1]. Which merely consists of the following observations:

(1) There were very few nominations of others; most of the nominations were self-nominations to the kernel summit. Which is OK, but

(2) there are academic studies showing that (a) women are less likely to raise their hands when answering math problems, even though they have a high rate of accuracy when they do, and (b) women are less likely to offer their ideas than men in business meetings, even though observers say their thoughts are often better than many offered by their male colleages, and,

(3) when the head of engineering at Google at the time sent an e-mail pointing out these studies, and reminding people it was time to self-nominate for promotion, the number of female applications, and the resulting number of promotion of women engineers, went up dramatically. When he forgot to send out the e-mail before one particular promo cycle, the rate dropped.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/02/google-data-mines-its-women-problem/

With all of that in mind, please take a look at the list, and if you see someone missing that you think should be considered, please send a nomination by end of the day on Monday, August 1st. Yes, the program committee will try to notice if someone should be included that either wasn't included by the algorithmic process, or by the nominations process, but please don't depend on us. :-)

Thanks,

- Ted