Working with the Video team

If you plan to organise a conference — be it in-person or online — and intend to record it, the first thing you should do is contact us! If we can, we’ll be happy to help you.

To ensure the quality of the recorded videos and the streams and to make things easier for everyone, this page describes our requirements and some guidelines. We can be flexible, and if something listed here cannot be achieved, we may work around it, but we would prefer not to.

General requirements

  1. You should contact us as soon as possible to see if the dates you chose work for us. Please do not take for granted our participation, especially for in-person events.

  2. You should have a good idea of the scale of your event in terms of number of talks, parallel tracks and potential attendees. A single-track weekend conference for 50 people and a two-week long conference with three parallel tracks for 300 people require very different resources.

  3. As the organisers of a conference, we expect you to find volunteers to help with the video tasks. We’ll gladly setup training sessions for them and teach everyone how the video systems work. Depending on the type of conference you are organising, you can consult our in-person or online volunteer roles to get a better idea of how many people you will need.

In-person conferences

  1. In-person conferences require the physical presence of at least two core video team members, and ideally four. We encourage you to take in account the eventual travel and accommodation costs this entails when you create your budget.

  2. Although in some cases we’re able to provide a part of it ourselves, you will likely have to rent some video equipment. Once you give us plans of the rooms you intend to use, we will provide you with a clear list of the equipment you will need to rent.

  3. To avoid a number of problems, your venue will need to meet certain criteria. You can find a detailed checklist on our venue checklist page.

  4. We encourage you to use wafer, the conference website framework DebConf has been using since 2016. If need be, we will be happy to help you set up and configure an instance.

Online conferences

  1. We expect speakers to pre-record their talks in advance. Live talks at an online conference often lead to technical problems, resulting in bad quality videos. We strongly encourage you to refer speakers to our advice for recording online presentations.

  2. We strongly suggest you use wafer, the conference website framework DebConf has been using since 2016. If need be, we will be happy to help you set up and configure an instance.