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On 12/15/23 7:33 AM, Guilherme Espada wrote:
Adam Chlipala wrote:
> at the same as our conferences are applying
> significant financial cost and volunteer effort to provide what may
> actually be a net negative.
I will not pass judgment on the rest of your email, but I feel like there
is something I must clarify:
Our 'in-house' AV Team actually *saves* SIGPLAN a fair chunk of money,
in most
cases even in comparison to just having in-room AV fully provided by
the hotel.
It also incorrect to assume that if we stopped recording talks, the
tech issues
would magically disappear.
Certainly, it is a complex job to get the bits to the right places at
the right times, and the volunteer team that you lead has done a great
job of solving that problem cost-effectively! I just think it is
worthwhile for the community to decide what value we place on a solution
to that hard problem.
In addition, recording talks provide a valuable service:
* To the members of the community who cannot afford to attend.
* To the members of other communities who might have an
interest in some intersectional work.
I think the perceived value of talks in the first place, even those
experienced in-person, may be out-of-wack with the realities of
advantages vs. reading papers. Everyone can read the papers in any
case, especially given SIGPLAN's commitment to open access. Our brains,
tuned through evolution in small hunter-gatherer bands, attach value to
being in the same room as impressive people saying things well (and,
with some discount factor, to virtual approximations thereof), as the
ability to attend impressive talks is connected to building social
status in the group. However, I think it's questionable that this
medium scores well for actual explanation of complex ideas, compared to
papers.
* To the authors, who greatly appreciate having a recorded version of
their
talk, both for reference, exposure and archival.
This mode can be accommodated easily with authors recording their own
videos, which are likely to be higher-quality than what is captured at a
conference. The conference infrastructure can still accommodate
distributing author-produced videos, as we did in many cases during
lockdown.
Given we have volunteers who
believe in the mission of making the community more open, and that gladly
provide this service, I don't think there is a good reason to stop
recording.
We've been together in a conference session recently whose start was
delayed at least 30 minutes for debugging of AV issues. I believe that
would be significantly less likely to happen if we only needed to get
pixels over an HDMI cable to a projector. My understanding of
video-streaming workflows is that they invariably require relatively
complex software to intervene between the presenter's laptop and the
display screen, which need not be the case without a goal to send a talk
elsewhere. These delays should be appreciated as real costs of more
complex arrangements. (This community is in a good position to realize
how much less reliable systems can become when they move from
hardware-only to include software!)
