When the announcement for the 2023 MPS community Meetup read:
We had more submissions than expected so it took us time to decide the agenda. We are excited with the line-up and hope to see you in Munich very soon!
I was genuinely excited. Knowing the number of people on MPS Slack have grown to over 1100 members in the past years, I was expecting lots new names and topics on the agenda.
The bigger my disappointment when I looked at the actual agenda.
The first day is entirely composed of either talks by people affiliated with the organisers or topics that have at least once been presented at a previous MPS Meetup. Compared to the announcement that there was more content than space on the agenda and talks had to be cut this seems strange.
Looking at the overall talk time of the event (9:45h) it looks even worse. 5:30h, over 50% of the overall time, are dedicated to the organisers. If there were more talks from the community that did not make it on the agenda then I would have expected the organisers to drop some of their presentations in favour of community contributions.
On the MPS Slack Sergej planned to submit a
presentation about building MPS projects, a constant struggle in any
project, which did not make it. Instead, we are getting 90 minutes, or 15% of the whole event, dedicated to modelix a
topic that isn’t even a core MPS thing.
I previously thought that the talk by Sergej was rejected. In the meantime people reached out to me privately to clarify that this was not the case.
Since the large number of talks by organisers felt much larger than in the past, I looked at the previous community meet-ups. In 2019 and 2018 combined we had 5:30h of talks by organisers, the same amount as we now have in a single Meetup.
Although the agenda might be a bit of a disappointment I’m looking forward to meeting many familiar faces in Munich.
