Last week, X.Org Developers Conference 2020 was held online for the first time. This year, with all the COVID-19 situation that is affecting almost every country worldwide, the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors decided to make it virtual.
I love open-source conferences :-) They are great for networking, have fun with the rest of community members, have really good technical discussions in the hallway track… and visit a new place every year! Unfortunately, we couldn’t do any of that this time and we needed to look for an alternative… being going virtual the obvious one.
The organization team at Intel, lead by Radoslaw Szwichtenberg and Martin Peres, analyzed the different open-source alternatives to organize XDC 2020 in a virtual manner. Finally, due to the setup requirements and the possibility of having more than 200 attendees connected to the video stream at the same time (Big Blue Button doesn’t recommend more than 100 simultaneous users), they selected Jitsi for speakers + Youtube for streaming/recording + IRC for questions. Arkadiusz Hiler summarized very well what they did from the A/V technical point of view and how was the experience hosting a virtual XDC.
I’m very happy with the final result given the special situation this year: the streaming was flawless, we didn’t have almost any technical issue (except one audio issue in the opening session… like in physical ones! :-D), and IRC turned out to be very active during the conference. Thanks a lot to the organizers for their great job!
However, there is always room for improvements. Therefore, the X.Org Foundation board is asking for feedback, please share with us your opinion on XDC 2020!
Just focusing on my own experience, it was very good. I enjoyed a lot the talks presented this year and the interesting discussions happening in IRC. I would like to highlight the four talks presented by my colleagues at Igalia :-D
- “Overview of the open source Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4” presented by Iago Toral (watch recording).
- “About OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability.” presented by Eleni Maria Stea (watch recording).
- “Quick GL and Vulkan tests with shader_runner and Amber” presented by Arcady Goldmints-Orlov (watch recording).
- “How the Vulkan VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state extension came to be” presented by Ricardo Garcia (watch recording).
This year I was also a speaker! I presented “Improving Khronos CTS tests with Mesa code coverage” talk (watch recording), where I explained how we can improve the VK-GL-CTS quality by leveraging Mesa code coverage using open-source tools.
I’m looking forward to attending X.Org Developers Conference 2021! But first, we need an organizer! Requests For Proposals for hosting XDC2021 are now open!
See you next year!