X.Org Foundation Issues Hasty CFP For XDC2012

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 3 August 2012 at 07:47 AM EDT. 26 Comments
X.ORG
The X.Org Developers' Conference 2012 is happening next month. Unfortunately, continuing to reflect the hastily-managed organization, the board has now come up with a call for presentations.

XDC2012 is happening from 19 to 21 of September in Nürnberg, Bavaria, Germany. This three-day event focused upon X.Org and FreeDesktop.org projects (including Mesa and Wayland) will take place from the Nürnberg SUSE office. It's just another developer event following in their yearly tradition to get together to hash out plans for future X.Org Server releases, Wayland, open-source 3D drivers, etc.

At the time of publishing, there's 24 registered attendees (the list). On the list so far are the usual suspects from Red Hat, Intel, SUSE, the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors, and various independent contributors. There are some names missing from the list, but they usually register at the last minute anyhow and it rarely matters since it's uncommon for XDC/XDS to exceed registration. At the SUSE office there's room for about 60 people, so this year shouldn't have any attendance constraints.

At the moment there's only four ideas listed on the program/talk schedule (the list), but that too generally fills up at the last minute for the loosely-organized development event.
- Recap, vulnerabilities, attacks and discussions on the graphic stack's security : Martin Peres
- Return of experience on the EVoC : How to better prepare the students : Martin Peres
- 15 minute talk about development state and features of the joystick input module : Sascha Hlusiak
- Discuss the future of EGL, GLX, and OpenGL ES on Linux.
To much surprise this morning, the X.Org Board of Directors issued a "Call For Presentations" for this event. This is the first time such a formal CFP has been issued for XDC/XDS in years. Usually everything comes together at the last minute and there's sufficient time for everyone who speaks. Or as the organizer of last year's XDC2011 Chicago conference, there's even enough time for a beer-fueled afternoon. (Yes, there should be more Phoronix-sponsored beer at XDC2012, except being in Franconia/Bavaria it's much better beer and the beer will likely be available all day.)


Nürnberg, Germany


The idea of a Call For Presentations isn't bad, but it's being done by X.Org at the very last minute -- there's one month to go until the event and the CFP window is closing already in two weeks -- while generally this is organized months in advance. Beyond that, when I saw the email this morning and mentioned it to Egbert Eich, the SUSE employee organizing the event, this CFP was even news to him. They talked about it months ago, but the board never decided to act upon it until now. So at the very last minute they're now seeking technical talk abstracts, informal white papers, and technical research papers within the next two weeks from among the ~24 attendees to fill up three days of talks. The CFP process is likely to be a flop that's ignored.

This really isn't surprising though seeing as it took the X.Org Board of Directors more than one month to simply announce/confirm its 501(c)(3) status and a host of other managerial issues. "Though if you're hoping the X.Org Foundation as a 501(c)3 will make them better organized and responsible, it sadly doesn't look that way. At the same meeting it was brought up they were late in paying their Delaware taxes, only now are they talking about a $15,000 that Intel evidently promised them two years ago for XDS Toulouse, and a host of other issues. (And heck, they still haven't even sent off a quick e-mail to publicly announce their new non-profit status themselves.) They may be phenomenal developers, but not the best at running an organization."

At least this year for XDC, SUSE has donated the venue for the X.Org developers so the board doesn't have to worry about making a payment, so they aren't late again -- unlike last year and on other occasions.

If anyone's interested in the XDC2012 CFP it can be found on the mailing list. The important XDC Nürnberg details meanwhile are available from the X.Org Wiki.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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