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