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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