Hi team!
Since a few years, debconf has given speakers the ability to mark a talk
as one that should not be recorded on video. Such talks sometimes get
scheduled in rooms with video equipment.
As a member of the FOSDEM organisation, which has an official policy of
"if you want it to happen at FOSDEM, you MUST consent to it being
recorded on video", I must say I am disheartened by this. Having a talk
or BoF be on camera is often useful for various reasons:
- It allows remote participation by those of us not lucky enough to make
it to the DebConf in question;
- It creates a record of what has been said in the talk, which can be
useful to refer to after the fact;
- It allows people for who English is not a first language to replay the
video a few times until they understand what is happening, and/or for
things to be subtitled so that they can follow what's happening in
their native language (this latter doesn't happen as often as we'd
like currently, but we do have a setup for subtitling).
- If you want to be at two talks or BoFs which happen at the same time,
you can go to the one talk in the knowledge that you'll always be able
to watch the video of the other one.
While I can understand that sometimes there may be reasons for things
not to be recorded, I think that in service of the greater Debian
community, DebConf should try to make as many events as possible be
public; that is, we should make things recorded by default, not by the
whim of the speaker/facilitator of the talk or BoF.
It's obviously way too late for this to happen right now anymore, but
I[1] would like to suggest that for next year, submission procedures are
changed so that:
- The form where talk submissions can be made is, if necessary, changed
so that things will be recorded by default, unless the speaker
explicitly requests otherwise;
- It is made clear that "I don't think this would be useful" is not
in and of itself a good enough reason (other people might reasonably
disagree with that position);
- If a speaker requests that a talk not be recorded, we ask them to
explain why they request that, so that if the request is based on a
misunderstanding of what that would entail practically this can be
cleared up;
- Talks which are marked as not recorded will by default be scheduled in
rooms which have no video content, so that if the not to be recorded
talk is marked so for privacy reasons, we don't have to worry about
video equipment being left on by mistake, and so that talks which
might otherwise have been usefully recorded can still be scheduled in
a room with the necessary equipment.
Thoughts?
Thanks,
[1] and with "I", I mean that this is my personaly opinion, not
necessarily that of the video team of which I am a member; other
members of the video team might or might not agree, I haven't
formally brought it up with them.
--
Could you people please use IRC like normal people?!?
-- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, trying to quiet down the buzz in the DebConf 2008
Hacklab
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