Re: [MAINTAINERS SUMMIT] Time to cal l it quits for the maintainer summit?

On 9 August 2026 15:04:33 GMT-04:00, Jonathan Corbet <[email protected]> wrote:
>"Theodore Tso" <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> As another thought, when we had 100+ people attending the Kernel
>> Summit, that we would make a *point* of inviting people who had never
>> attended Kernel Summits before, so we would get new blood attending
>> the Summit.  After we significantly reduced the the size of the
>> Maintainers Summit to 30, we've stopped doing this as a deliberate
>> practice.  Should we change this?
>
>FWIW, in my role in the program committee, I have always tried to think
>about who we should bring in that hasn't been there before - with a
>certain amount of success, I hope.
>
>We could perhaps do better, maybe with a rule that N% of the seats
>should be filled by first-time attendees.  But we do also have to be
>sure that the right people are in the room handle the topics under
>consideration, and that will inevitably include a number of old-timers
>who have been there before.
>

As one of the maintainers that has not attended the MS, I cannot fully understand all the issues faced by the group.

But I, like many, joined the kernel community to be part of something bigger than ourselves alone.  The decisions made are not financially motivated, and that alone is worth praise.

Considering the size of the community, I would hope that the people in the room have become more representative of thier subsystem or subgroup than just voicing what they believe is the right path alone.  If that's not the case then I can see why the decision is upsetting; the process is disregarding voices in favour of a known quantity.

I do find that the selection for the group does fall on the usual suspects, and I wonder if introducing some new people could help bring in new views.  

Cycling a percent of new people through will probably not fix this.  You will have 100 first dates to find someone that fits, and potentially 99 other displeased contributors.  That is, it is extremely unlikely the new attendee will get the traction with the regulars and walk away disheartening, offended, or simply as a fly on the wall afraid to say anything.  One could draw parallels with new patch contributors.

We do have more than enough people around in each core area with their views of what's going on and how things should be handled  - which actually sounds like it could be a strength over a source of guilt.

We could have a reserved number of seats dedicated for specific subject that are temporary seats that would be used for a specific topic.  As a specific topic expert or interested party, they would be less likely to stay quiet or be disregarded as not knowing the workings of a specific policy.

This brings to mind something else which I've been think for some time, we should have delegates when someone cannot make it in person.  Not as a replacement, but as someone that can speak up when things are relevant to their particular expertise - and potentially to help the succession planning of that subsystem.

Maybe we expand the group to two people per subsystem/area to better represent the diverse ideas that exist in the group.

Alternatively (or maybe as an addition) we could have pre-MS within each subsystem or related subsystems and a feedback loop after MS.  The idea here is to at least have some voices heard by the maintainer going to the summit for each group.  For example at LFS, we could have topics for the MS to discuss with Andrew before he attends LPC.  We sort of do this already but a formal process across all subsystems should exist.

Thanks,
Liam