Re: Cluster meeting?

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:29 PM, Tatsuo Ishii <ishii@postgresql.org> wrote:
> Does anybody know the Developer Meeting schedule was fixed or not?

There will be a closed developer meeting on Tuesday morning.  Instead
of spending a whole day doing a closed developer meeting as we have in
the past, we will instead have a half-day closed session and then
switch to an unconference format for Tuesday afternoon and all of
Wednesday.  So, depending on your point of view, the developer meeting
is either half as long as before (half a day instead of all day) or
twice as long as before (two days instead of one day).

I suggest that it would be best to integrate the cluster summit into
the unconference time.  In the unconference format, the schedule is
not determined in advance; rather, it is determined at the event.  We
will ask those attending the unconference what topics they wish to
talk about.  Then, we will ask those in attendance which talks they
wish to attend.  The talks that are popular will be assigned a room
from among the three allocated to the unconference.  The talks that
few or no attendees wish to attend won't be assigned a room, and thus
won't happen.

I think this format offers several advantages.  On the one hand, I
expect the unconference to include a large number of the senior
PostgreSQL developers, and so clustering-related topics which are of
interest may attract the attention of senior hackers who have not gone
to the cluster summit in the past.  On the other hand, both the
developer meeting and the cluster summit have the problem that time is
sometimes allocated to topics in which there is not much interest,
because the organizers do not want to say "no" to anyone.  The
unconference format will help us to solve this problem by asking
attendees to vote, not just on the clustering topics, but on all the
topics.  People will not need to decide between attending the cluster
summit and skipping it; they can decide to attend sessions on the
specific topics they want to hear about.

Ultimately, I think it is very important to integrate "cluster
hacking" back into "PostgreSQL hacking".   This mailing list
(pgsql-cluster-hackers) is all but dead. Meanwhile, interesting
cluster work is being done on pgsql-hackers (see commit
cb1ca4d800621dcae67ca6c799006de99fa4f0a5 and
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/4/161/ among other examples).  We
need to stop thinking of clustering as something that is going to
happen only outside of PostgreSQL core and begin thinking of it as an
integral part of the work that we need to do to make PostgreSQL
successful.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company