Various updates, prep notes for speakers

[Amin Bandali]

Hi all,

I spent some time this evening putting together a "prepare" page for
EmacsConf 2020 at https://emacsconf.org/2020/prepare/, based on last
year's page but with a number of changes, which I plan to email out to
all speakers over the next few days.  Sacha, Corwin, and Leo made many
improvements to my preliminary version (thanks for the discussions in
#emacsconf-org, y'all!).

dto, bremner, and Karl, I'd appreciate it if you too would take a look
at the notes and propose/make any changes you deem necessary.

In the notes I mention that we are evaluating BigBlueButton, Jitsi Meet,
and GNU Jami.  However, we are currently leaning towards BigBlueButton
for the video calls with speakers for this year.  Much like last year,
we would like to schedule tech-checks with speakers who would like to
present live.  So far, Corwin, Leo, and myself have volunteered to do
the tech-checks.  If you're able and willing to help as well, I would
appreciate it if you could add yourself to the table there.  We have a
list of things to check for during the tech-checks (please feel free to
add to it if we missed anything).

In other news, I set up a Mumble server for us at mumble.emacsconf.org.
See https://mumble.emacsconf.org for instructions on how to connect to
it.  I like to suggest that we use it at least for quick communications
between ourselves during the event, since speaking/talking is arguably
easier than typing.

I think we should discuss the following:

1. We should ask our speakers to consider providing us with an
   alternative way of reaching them (e.g. via phone) during the event,
   in case of an urgent matter during or just before their presentation,
   in case we can't get a hold of them via IRC or the main video call
   during their talk due to some technical issue or oversight.

   We can store these additional information in a temporary private git
   repository.  Corwin, Davids, Karl, and Leo, please send me your SSH
   pubkey off-list so I could give you access to the private repository.

2. Handling the Q&A sessions.  Last year, we took most questions from
   IRC, from both #emacsconf and #emacsconf-questions.  We had a mix of
   a) the speaker being present on IRC and reading/taking questions from
   there themself, or b) me or Sacha looking over IRC and passing the
   questions along to the speaker live.

   We can do something similar for this year too, but we figured since
   we will likely be using BigBlueButton, we could try asking the
   audience members who have a question to directly join the BBB room
   for the current talk and interact with the speaker there.  As long as
   the number of people joining is reasonable, this might work out well.
   This also goes hand in hand with us trying to figure out how to let a
   talk continue beyond the limited allotted time off the main stream,
   where we might either let the interested people join the room
   directly or have a volunteer that would take over streaming and/or
   recording the room once the organizer running the main stream leaves
   the room to proceed to the next talk.

   As such, besides the main streamer (likely me), some of us will
   likely need to volunteer to stream and/or record the off-track
   portion of such talks and to take over when the main streamer moves
   on to the next talk.  Those of you who have a machine with decent
   specs would you please volunteer to help with this?

3. Should we have our Mumble server as an additional communication
   channel besides our IRC channels?  If so, we would probably need to
   have at least one or two of us (or other new volunteers) keep an eye
   (well, ear ;-)) on our Mumble server and moderate it.  Or should we
   keep it under the wraps for the most part and use it only for comms
   between ourselves?


What do you think?

Thanks,
amin

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