FOSS4G'13

At the upcoming sanitation hackathons and previous water hackathons the event(s) were recorded using U-Stream. From this hardware was required in each of the rooms (ie. camera, laptop). This was for a live stream. I believe you can set it up to record the entire session. From this you'd need to segment and edit according to the sessions. At State Of The Map during the final plenary an auction will take place selling the conference equipment. I once brought a laptop from this, could be a way of recouping much of the initial cost of doing this.

I'm broadly in favour.

There is portable recording kit available in the university from the AV people, similar to what's used to record the OSGIS sessions (we've used it for recording internal seminars in our building, for example). We should probably look into that (maybe via Shelley) first.

Some thoughts on this:

Recording presentations can involve collecting a number of things:

1. Screen capture - a recording of what was on any display screen
2. Presenter recording - a video recording of the speaker. The speaker
either stands still or a camera needs to follow.
3. Audio - including presenter audio, audience questions,
presentation-related sounds (from video playback - GISRUK had a poster on
something about representing place with sound...)
4. Transcript - text transcript of talk for search and metadata purposes -
this can be a direct transcript of spoken words or a version written as a
guide script
5. Presentation slide material. If the talk does not involve live demos,
web sites etc this can substitute for (1).
6. Other basic metadata (speaker, keywords etc)

Presenting these items either requires some editing to switch between
presenter and screen video, or to sync slide material with a given
presentation, or clever multi-channel client software for the user to see
multiple streams (Lancaster is just starting with a lecture capture system
that does a picture-in-picture system that the user can switch to focus on
the lecturer or the screen).

How much of all this is feasible? Who has time to edit it?

Lancaster's lecture capture system sounds amazing. The lecture theatre
talks to the timetable system and knows when a lecture is due. It starts
recording the presenter and the screens automatically. At the end of the
lecture the lecturer can log in to the web system, view the lecture, and
add documents or notes. Its all integrated with our Moodle VLE instance so
lectures appear as items in each course. I'm not sure students will have to
bother to get up for 9am lectures any more. [Actually this tech is all very
new for this year, and only a few lecture theatres have the kit ready]

I personally find recorded presentations with just screen capture plus
audio immensely dull - I'd rather have a text transcript which I can read
much faster and skip the boring bits. So marginally better than nothing.
Screen cap + presenter cap + audio feels a bit more like being there, but
requires editing or multi-screen software.

This all sounds great but for me three big questions:

1. Do any let alone many people actually sit for hours listening/watching/reading this? My instinct is very few and probably only to a couple of the keynotes.
2. This is a bucket load of work if the content is going to be usable. Who is going to do all of the editing etc that would be required? How will we cover up to 8 rooms and if we don't cover all of the rooms how do we decide which sessions to cover?
3. Who will pay for this? The tech (and the bandwidth to live stream) is not cheap. Eclipse previously indicated that they might fund but we have not progressed this discussion. We don't have any budget allowance for this so it must have a sponsor or come for free.

You will gather that I am a bit of a sceptic on this one but I am only one voice so let others speak up. 

Perhaps Jeremy and Suchith could give us some feedback on how many views the OSGIS talks have had in the past?

Personally I'm with Steven, to the extent that I'd take a slideshare presentation and/or a pdf over anything live.

Jo

One thing that we could ask speakers to do is to ensure that they have some good speaker notes with their slides so that people viewing the decks after the event can understand what they were saying even if the slides are very graphic (in my case my slides usually only have a 1 or 2 word title so they are useless without notes).

Whilst it won't be popular with everyone, Google Docs handles slides, animations and speaker notes much better than slideshare