M.-A. Lemburg:

Sure, there's always a benefit in being able to access presentations
after they have been given. However, in the past, not even the slides
were made available by all speakers. IMHO, tt would be far better to
at least get all those together on the website, rather than discussing
the next steps.


I would like to stress this a little bit more. In fact, I've
had trouble for all past Python conferences, whatever their
names and places were, when it came to getting anything like
a complete set of slides for that event. Maybe I'm the only
one who cannot attend all Python events in the world and would
like to have at least something written/graphic I can follow
onscreen (or even paper - yes, there still is paper) to see
what I missed, but I guess I'm not. I've been pointing to this
issue on various occasions at least for the past few EuroPython
conferences, but so far with little effect.

To be honest, the current enthusiasm for video recordings of
such events comes as a surprise to me. I understand the tech-
nology becomes easier to use, but it's a long way from there
to getting something done that is actually worth the effort.
Looking e.g. at the most seen PyCon'08 video, I think you'll
agree with me that this is a waste of time and resources (and
despite that, the talk itself might have been excellent):

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-heME0gEDmY

Having a cool medium doesn't guarantee useful results. This is
no new insight, of course. Remember (if you can): when desktop
publishing was born, people also thought, that would finally
make producing excellent looking documents as easy as 1+1.

Same with home videos, and now conference videos. Making vi-
deos that deserve being watched takes time and resources. For
good ones you typically need dynamic panning and zooming and
also more than a single camera to switch between the presenter
and his material. I know, because I'm taking videos of music
performances several times a year.

Well, sorry if you already knew all this. I just wanted to draw
your attention back to quality again and deemphasize the cool-
ness factor for a medium that clearly has the potential of pro-
ducing great documentation, but neither at zero nor little
effort. And this effort must be balanced with the results you
get, and for the videos I've seen so far, quite frankly, most
of the time I would have been happier with a PDF document.

Regards,

Dinu

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