Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes: > 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? I know that some of them were specifically requested to be without recording, so I suppose there is no reason to put them in a different room if that was going to leave the room empty. Also, the ad-hoc sessions do not get video coverage, as a matter of policy. Is what you're seeing (or rather not seeing ;-) ) actually an articact of there being a lot of ad-hoc sessions? Perhaps we need to re-examine that policy, or the reason for there being a lot of ad-hoc sessions in that case? Cheers, Phil. -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] HANDS.COM Ltd. |-| http://www.hands.com/ http://ftp.uk.debian.org/ |(| Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34, 21075 Hamburg, GERMANY
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