Announcement of Changes to Future LISA Conferences

A Statement by the LISA Steering Committee on behalf of the USENIX Association

Starting in 2018, LISA will run for three days, rather than six.

We heard you! You couldn’t get your boss to agree to let you go for six days, or stepping away from other responsibilities for that long was too hard. It was also a firehose of content, and trying to keep it all in your brain upon returning to work was a real challenge. Could we take LISA and make it into a reasonably sized conference that still had amazing talks and training? Yes, we could, and we have.

LISA is one of the longest running tech conferences, originating in 1987, and we are proud that it continues to be among the most popular events in an increasingly crowded field. Over the past 30 years, LISA has grown from a short workshop to a multi-track conference, evolving in format to suit the needs of a changing community. Most recently, we’ve added training sessions within the main conference program to allow instructors to rapidly expose attendees to new topics; created LISA Lab and LISA Build to increase hands-on experience; and expanded invited talks to allow more industry experts to share their knowledge.

The new format will better allow attendees to fit LISA into their busy travel, work, and personal lives. We’ll continue to highlight the strengths of LISA, with three days of talks and training, LISA Build and LISA Lab, the expo, and the great conversations that happen in the hallway track and Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions. The more focused scope also gives us the opportunity to push the proposal deadline closer to each conference to allow for emerging content and the latest updates, while also giving USENIX more flexibility around location and timing. This change also aligns the format with the rest of the family of systems engineering conferences, spread throughout the year in multiple geographic locations: LISA, SREcon Americas, SREcon Europe/Middle East/Africa, and SREcon Asia/Australia.

LISA is an amazing conference and one of the highlights of our year. The LISA18 Call for Participation will be released this quarter, and we encourage you to submit a proposal. The deadline for submissions will be May 24, 2018. Interested in helping organize the conference? Send email to lisa@usenix.org. We look forward to seeing all of you in Nashville this coming October!