[Video] importance of conference recording

[Paul Wayper]

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On 06/19/2013 07:34 PM, Carl Karsten wrote:
...
> I have successfully dealt with it.  For PyCon US (now NA) I discourage 
> anyone from volunteering to help me if they are not going to do it full
> time.  This means I have to work harder to find people, but that work is
> done before the event so it is a better use of my time.  In the end, same
> amount of work, but better results.

Interesting.  My attitude at LCA was: I told the volunteer coordinator what
I wanted, and I got it.  He coordinated all the shift changes, made sure we
had two people in each room, made sure they had a bit of training
beforehand, and fixed problems when they occurred.  I didn't have to
organise volunteers at all.  This worked for me fine :-)

You can do it your way, Carl, no problem.  But I think there are other ways :-)

> Another angle on this problem is trying to figure out much of the over 
> all conference resources should be allocated to Video Recording.   And 
> really it goes beyond the conference budget - There is a large resources
> pool that multiple events draw from.  It is not a well defined or
> documented pool, but it exists.  If an event draws from the pool, it
> reduces what is left for other events.  If 5 events all do their own
> Recording project, it drains more than if the same team does all 5
> events.

I'm not sure whether you are using 'resources' to mean 'people' or
'equipment' here.  Certainly, conferences use both people and equipment, and
both have to be in one place at one time.  Even having two conferences
straight after eachother - not overlapping - can cause problems, as I think
LCA 2012 found with DrupalCon happening just before it.

People can be trained.  Equipment is harder to move around than knowledge,
and it breaks down.  But having boxes of equipment ready to go is what makes
recording LCA (relatively) easy these days.

> I also think it is worth discussing what the goals of the effort is 
> anyway.  5 years ago I felt it was a good idea to spend my time trying to
> build a community of people who would mange recording events.  I am happy
> to talk to people about it and help them, but I no longer encourage
> anyone "go do video for your show, I will be on line to help you
> remotely."    Now I encourage them to get one of us that has done it
> before to be in charge of video at that show, and the person in question
> can consider doing it themselves next year.   Most of the time they ask
> me back next year.

Sure.  Many people asked me "why didn't you just get a company to record
video at LCA?" - from my partner to people who've been organising
conferences for years.  I've talked about some of my reasons over the last
several days.

But I am intrigued as to why you have moved away from helping people and
instead want to do it yourself?  Do you think others can't do it as well as
you can?  Are you sick of seeing people stuff it up?  Do you hate being
brought in at the last minute to fix things?  I can understand all of those
motives, so I'm interested in yours :-)

Hope this helps,

Paul
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