Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018/FAQ

Just for the record, I feel compelled to state that Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018/FAQ#Will there be video recording? (spoiler: NO!) is pretty bogus.

If you merely follow the first link provided to Chatham House Rules, you'll find: "Meetings, events and discussions held at Chatham House are normally conducted 'on the record' with the Rule occasionally invoked at the speaker's request. In cases where the Rule is not considered sufficiently strict, an event may be held 'off the record'."

That is, I have no objection to portions of the event being under Chatham House Rules, but even the original Chatham House Rules caution against over-application. For the majority of our technical questions, there is no need to cloak proponents and opponents, and doing so only makes our decision making more opaque and cabal-like. For those not invited to the conference, it makes it unnecessarily difficult to follow up with proponents of a particular position, contribute additional technical information, or correct a misunderstanding.

And the other arguments proposed seem to be tearing down a strawman. Yes, you can spend a seemingly unlimited amount of money on video production. But in this day and age, a basic and serviceable recording can be made by any one of the participants with their cell phone, sitting in a corner. It can even be streamed live in this manner!

Textual notes are often maddeningly incomplete and lack context. A cheap video-recording promotes transparency and helps fill in gaps in the notes, even if the recording is only viewed a handful of times by a small number of engineers actually implementing suggestions made in that session. The recording can easily be paused, eliminated, or made private to the participants for specific sessions where the invocation of Chatham House Rules is appropriate.

Anyway, I know this is far too late to affect the conduct of this particular conference, but I needed to clear my conscience by putting my strong objection on the record. Restricting attendance, cloaking participants, and removing all but an approved textual summary is contrary to the principles of open and transparent process.

Hey cscott! So, we made a massive effort in 2016 to record sessions at the Developer Summit. It took 4 full-time people working long days at the conference (not to mention the pre-event efforts) to make it happen and the feedback from those people was that they would have needed even more help if they were going to do it again (this is a huge amount of funding and staffing resources if you consider the size of our budgets and organization teams which are often already severely limited and stretched). But because we wanted to give this a shot, and try to be more inclusive we made the effort to give recording the conference a shot. I just went back and checked all the YouTube view counts from those recordings and currently from the ones that I saw after a brief search they have between 16 - 59 views per video. Keep in mind that we had event more folks involved in sending emails, adding links to the videos from our event page, and social media blasts letting the wider community know that these videos were available. If many thousands of people internationally were benefiting from the recordings and interacting with us because of them then there would be no question that it was worth it, but sadly that is not the case. I know it seems like an easy task to "just record" everything that happens at a conference but it is really not, and it might be worth having a chat with Brendan from the IT team to get a better understanding of what really has to go into it behind the scenes. He would be able to speak more eloquently about how much actually goes into it than I would. Secondly, if this is a very strong point of contention for many people (please chime in here if you also strongly feel that video recording should be mandatory so we can get an idea of this is a widely held view or not) it would probably be worth gathering a large group of people that really feel the same way and then we can take this up during the next annual planning phase when we are budgeting things in for this event. As for how to make positive impact in this area this year, if you have ideas, suggestions, thoughts, or anything else regarding how to make the notes less "maddeningly incomplete and lack context" please please help the notetakers and template builders understand what would be more helpful to you. We are dedicated to this conference being transparent and are brining folks to the conference in a dedicated note-taking role. I have created a Phab task for any constructive ideas! :) https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198988 As for "Chatham House Rules" we are just giving it a shot now because the Wikimedia Conference and Harmful Speech Online: At the Intersection of Algorithms and Human Behavior Conference have had really positive feedback from their attendees about it and how it helped them feel safer/ more comfortable about expressing themselves. I am all for trying things out, however I can guarantee that if we get wide-spread feedback that Chatham House Rules are not helpful then we certainly don't have to use them in the future.

Rachel, obviously my gripe isn't directed at you or at the heroic efforts in the past. I appreciate all you do to make these events happen! (And appreciate the efforts from the many notetakers, who do their best!) I would just like to see us try to make "less effort" instead of abandoning recording. I have certainly done conferences in the past where, just like we request a notetaker for the session, we just asked for one participant to record the session on their phone and upload the video. It can be done. (And audio-only recordings are even easier.) Yes, the results are not high quality -- but if only ~50 folks are watching, then professional quality isn't needed! And even fifty folks is doubling the reach of the sessions, given that we're spending far more to get the ~50 in-person participants in the room.

If the statement was, "There is no budget or official support for video recording, but volunteers who would like to make the sessions accessible to remote viewers can coordinate their efforts at [[wikipage]]", I would have no problem!

I appreciate the thought behind the Chatham House Rules, I look forward to seeing how it works out. (I suspect a "harmful speech" conference would have a more sensitive discussions than a technical summit.)

I feel strongly that transparency should be one of the things we commit to even (especially?) when "no one's watching".