[Texas] [PyOhio-organizers] Opening up regional conferences

[Carl Karsten]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 6:32 AM, Greg Lindstrom <gslindstrom at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good job on pyOhio 2010, everyone.  I'm looking forward to pyTexas at the
> end of next week.
>
> pyArkansas will by on October 16, once again at the University of Central
> Arkansas but I have had an idea in my head for a few years now and wanted to
> get you thinking about it, too.  What do you think about webcasting some of
> your classes/talks next year?  On the simple end, I think if would be way
> cool (tm) to get one of the Universities in Conway (we have 3 of 'em!) to
> open up one of their multi-media centers for people to come
> watch/participate in a class.  On the more extravagant end, I thought it
> might be cool to coordinate some of the regional conferences to run on the
> same weekend and have talks originating from different places.  I have no
> idea of what's involved technically or financially, but thought it might be
> worth considering.  I spoke with Gloria about it at pyOhio and she said that
> it's common in Europe and that there is some pretty good open source
> software for it.  The motivation for me is to save money; it's expensive to
> bring in experts to Arkansas for our conference each year (though video
> conferencing may be more expensive).
>
> What do you think?  Too over-the-top

DebConf (what I went to straight after PyOhio) has been doing it
for... I think this was the 5th year.   for recording I use a subset
of the system they use.  The basic idea is: a lower quality version of
what is being recorded is also streamed.  audio is kept pretty high
quality, fps is dropped to about 5, which makes movement very jerky,
but the slides are still readable.  people watch the stream in a
browser and send feedback via IRC.  someone in the room will relay the
question from IRC.

It adds a fair bit of work to the pre-show setup, a little bit to
on-site setup, and hopefully 0 to the operations during talks.  If a
problem does come up during a talk, I think it is just fine to ignore
it until the talk ends and address it during the break.  trying to
address during drops the quality of the recording, which to me is 10x
more important.



-- 
Carl K