I am looking for volunteers for an effort related to video for IndiaFOSS 2025. Last year’s conference had @Arya_Kiran and @mangesh doing livestreaming (documented here). This year, the conference will be recording devrooms as well - that’s 6 devrooms * 3 hrs = 18 hrs of content, roughly comparable to the main track itself.
Why this effort ?
First, we’re a “tech” community - so we should use our talent to solve challenges we face. We have to create working, reliable, well documented systems that we can use in the entire community (not just IndiaFOSS) and hopefully beyond. How creative can we get ?
Second, this relates to sustainability of the conference. Video and photography are significant costs. We should look to keep them to the minimum level possible, so that as our activities scale, those costs don’t baloon.
Last (but not the least), I feel by doing more of these things is how we actually become an active community. This is probably a useful part of our “education” efforts, where people with specialized knowledge can work on and share some of it in the process of doing useful things.
This is all part of things we can learn from other communities - e.g. FOSSDEM conference has been making their own “video box”. FOSSDEM runs ~70 devrooms ! The latest iteration of their solution is a custom hardware box. @fossdot got one and sent it to me. I will be testing it soon.
Here are some of the things you could be doing as a volunteer in this effort:
- Video live-streaming
- Evaluating video and various choices surrounding it
- Audio, video mixing
- Audio, video sync across multiple streams
- Various video recording setups, equipment. Cost and quality tradeoffs. Which are good ones to rent…
- Final editing to create high quality videos
- Creating a robust system that is resilient to failures such as network connectivity, power failures, user errors or oversight.
- Evaluating specific local hardware (low cost) for reliability
- Interesting tech approaches to record content - e.g. a camera that follows speaker on the podium, or follows a mic in the audience.
- Anything related to the web side of things - hosting/configuring software
- Lots of testing
- Documentation - very important. We’ll do things so that others can do more of the same.
We may or may not do everything above, and we may not do it all at once. The list is meant to be a sampling of possibilities. Most of the pieces already exist, so this is about us finding the mix that works well for local conditions. We may end up doing some software development too !
We need 2-4 volunteers. If you’re unsure, consider pitching in first. You will probably understand if you want to do this or not in the first kickoff meeting !
It helps to know some of these things, but you don’t have to know to be a volunteer. But, you’d have to be willing to spend at-least one full day a week towards this effort (plus 1 hr in a group meet), to do some technical activities. We have almost 2 months to go for IndiaFOSS, enough to get everything working well and tested !
To volunteer, drop in a message below. It would be good to know any prior experience with video/livestreaming, and which parts of this excite you the most. We’ll kick this off next weekend (26/27).