HOWTO: Preserving BarCamps

Oh! Woe is me! I can't make BarCampLondon 8. This will be the first BarCamp I've not been able to get to in ages.
Following hashtags is fun, if a little disjointed. What I really need is some way I could attend virtually.....

@barcamplondon idea for you: film all sessions & stick them on archive.org for those of us who don't have a ticket. Thoughts?

— Terence Eden is on Mastodon (@edent) November 10, 2010

@edent if you provide the cameras, the 20 person film / editing crew along with some budget sure 😉 Its probably a bit much sorry!

— BarCamp London (@barcamplondon) November 10, 2010

Does It Need To Be So Hard?

We don't need expensive crews. We have each other! The very idea of BarCamps is that they should be self-organised. So, if you're going to BCL8 this year, here's what I would like you to do...

• Got a smartphone or a flip camcorder? Video the sessions you're in.
• Got a less-than-smart-phone or a dictaphone? Record the audio of the sessions you run or participate in.
• Got neither? Offer to hold someone else's tech while they present.

Before long, every single session will have coverage of some kind and us poor sods who can't make it will still be able to vicariously share in the pleasure of London's greatest Unconference.

Video

There are loads of places to stick video up on the web. But most services have time and size restrictions or want you to pay to store your video. YouTube is limited to 15 minutes (no good for 30 minute BarCamp sessions) and Vimeo is limited to 500MB per week (no good if you've filmed in HD).

Here are two free services which I think will suit the BarCamp Crowd.

Archive.org

Archive.org is

building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

I believe this to be the best place to store the record of our culture.
Here's a video of me running a session at BarCamp Brighton. The video is hosted by Archive.org and can be downloaded in several formats.

Videos can be any length and any format. They'll be transcoded to MP4 and Ogg Video. Best of all, video can be uploaded via FTP - which makes queuing large uploads very easy. You can, of course, upload via your browser.

One point to note, videos have to be CreativeCommons or Public Domain.

There are already around 40 BarCamp videos on Archive.org.

Qik

If you have the bandwidth, Qik is the ideal place to stream and store video. I've found the application can be a little hit-and-miss - especially if WiFi coverage gets congested.
Here's my presentation from BarCamp Transparency.

Streaming Services

There are loads of sites which will let you stream video from your laptop's webcam. Please - whatever service you use - make sure that it is also recording the stream. It greatly saddens me that the presentations from awesome events like CharityHackDay are lost forever. They were streamed and then promptly vanished.

Audio

Video can be overkill. It takes a lot of effort to upload and just as much to download. It's often simpler just to record audio. Even the most basic phones tend to have a "voice record" function. Once you've got the audio, there are a number of places you can put it.

AudioBoo

Everyone loves AudioBoo. It's a great way of saving audio - although it's currently only available on iPhone. If you don't have an iPhone, you can upload any sound file you like to their website and they'll convert and host it.

Here is a recording of my session at BarCamp Brighton.

I decided to separate the main body of the talk from the discussion which followed afterwards.

Just personal preference.

Archive.org

There's a whole bunch of BarCamp audio already up on Archive.org.

Audacity

If you want to edit your audio, I highly recommend Audacity. It's free, open source, and works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Collating

Ok, so every session is now recorded and stored somewhere on the Internet. How do we go about organising this mass of video and audio?

Let's look at how some other conferences have done it.

OpenTech

One of the great things about OpenTech was the effort put in by the organisers to ensure every talk was preserved on wax cylinders mp3.
The session page is really well laid out and has links to audio and, in some cases, slides.

But what if you can't be bothered or don't have the time to manage a web page?

Lanyrd

Currently the darling of the conference scene, Lanyrd easily allows you to add "coverage" to sessions. You can attach notes, handouts, audio, video, slides, photos or links.

Privacy

@edent I recorded some videos of #bcl7 but they're massive to upload, some on my vimeo. Or some are "what's said in barcamp, stays in..."

— Richard Johnson (@chichard41) November 10, 2010

• Some people won't want their sessions recorded. Please ask presenters to check that they're happy to be immortalised.
• Everyone hates the sound of their own voice - do let people in the audience know if you're going to be recording.
• When in doubt, edit it out.

A Plea

I really want to attend BarCamp London. And BarCamp Manchester. And all the other BarCamps which I can't get to.

Please - if you can - record your session and upload it somewhere. Even a poorly shot, noisy, unedited video is better than none.

This is our digital heritage. We should be proud of what we create and ensure that it is available for posterity.