KS2007: Closing session

The final session of the 2007 kernel summit was about the kernel summit itself. Was this event what the attendees had hoped for, and how should things be done in the future?

Based on some straw polls, it seems that the group was generally satisfied with how things went. The more process-oriented agenda was popular, and it had visibly encouraged wide participation through the event. There is always some discomfort with the invitation-only nature of the summit, but most attendees seem to believe that it would not be possible to have the same sort of discussion in an open environment. The size of the group also appears to be about right; a smaller group would leave out too many people, while making it any larger would make good discussions harder.

The location of the summit has been the subject of ongoing debate for some time. Several summits in a row were held in Ottawa immediately before the Linux Symposium. Ottawa is a nice city, but going there every year gets a little tiresome after a while, so the number of complaints has been going up. Having the summit in Cambridge this year proved to be a popular change; it seems that the appetite for going back to Ottawa is pretty low.

A survey was held before the summit which, among other things, asked attendees to rank several potential host cities. Vancouver came out on top of the list, followed by colocation with linux.conf.au, wherever that may be. San Francisco and Portland were also high on the list. Ottawa was not. There were no European cities on the list, on the assumption that the summit would not be held in Europe two years in a row.

So potential locations for next year include Ottawa (OLS, evidently, will be held in the third week in July), with the in-the-works "plumbers conference" being planned for Portland in September, or with linux.conf.au at its 2009 location. While most attendees are willing to go to a summit in the U.S., there is a significant minority which is unwilling to travel there. But there is also a lot of interest in holding the summit somewhere else entirely: China or India, for example.

The problem with more distant locations is that it raises the cost of the event; travel to Asia can be expensive and tends to raise eyebrows in corporate accounting offices. David Miller strongly encouraged putting the event in Asia anyway. It is, he says, hypocritical of us to want developers from that part of the world to join our community while simultaneously refusing to host our gathering there. The presence of the kernel summit tends to give a fair amount of energy to any conference located with it; quite a few summit attendees had spoken at LinuxConf.eu earlier in the week. Where there is a will, he says, the money issues will work themselves out.

There was no conclusion reached on where the next summit will be. That sort of decision requires lengthy discussion between organizers and a hard look at how the budget will really work. The arrival of beer in the meeting room also proved to be a bit of a distraction. So, after a "thank you" to kernel summit maintainer Ted Ts'o, the event was brought to a close.