FOSS4GUK 2020 Online - Lessons Learnt
This is a draft at the moment!
Summary
FOSS4GUK 2020 Online was hosted by the OSGeo:UK committee on 17th June 2020 from 9.00am to 17.30pm UTC+1
The event was free to attend with all of the costs (see below) funded from OSGeo:UK reserves.
Delegates
- 1,000 people registered
- We estimate about 600 attended
- Maximum number online at any time was 460, minimum was 205
- Delegates from 77 countries
- 48% from GB, 8% US, 4% India
Programme
- 3 streams running for the whole day (except during keynotes)
- 2 keynotes
- 29 talks and demos
- 4 Lightning talks
- 38 Speakers (10 women)
- Coffee bar stream where delegates could hang out and chat (not heavily used)
Finances
- The only costs were the fees for the zoom account for 1 month: £198
- Delegate donations:
- OSGeo:UK 63 individual donations - gross £1,810, net after Paypal fees £1,744 (as of 2020-06-20)
- MapAction ?
Tech and tools
Choice of video conferencing platform
We considered
- webex (we had an offer of a free account from a sponsor) - problems with audio, uncertain linux support, limit on numbers
- hopin.to - a virtual conference application, unfortunately the demo the we attended was not successful and we did not feel comfortable taking the risk on a new service but it looks promising for the future
- several other services that did not seem to fit our needs
- jitsi - our experience of using the free hosted version left us uncomfortable with jitsi as platform for a large event with 3 streams. None of us had the experience or access to hardware and bandwidth to consider running a large self-hosted version of jitsi. We were also concerned about how we could control access or restrict anyone breaching our CoC
- several of us had experience of running large meetings on zoom and were confident that we could host the event on zoom and leverage it's capabilities.
What we learnt
- zoom worked as anticipated. We had no major technical problems and as far as we know very few participants experienced problems, zoom offers clients for Linux, Mac and Windows, iOS and Android.
- we were able to manage participants by muting everyone on entry and restricting chat within the app to messages to one of the hosts and from the hosts to the whole audience.
- the recording worked well, a co-host was asked to remind the host to start and stop the recording for each session to keep videos at a manageable size
- we saved all of the chat transcripts as part of our CoC policy (fortunately unnecessary)
We purchased:
- 1 account for up to 1,000 people for the keynotes
- 2 accounts for up to 500 people for the other streams
- 1 account for up to 100 people for the coffee bar
- An add on for large cloud storage for all of the video recordings
- Total cost £198 (a month's licenses)
We over-provisioned because we did not know how many people would actually log-in. We could have managed with smaller accounts and saved some money.
It is unclear whether we would have been better off purchasing zoom webinar licenses rather than large meetings.
We were aware that the zoom meetings could have been streamed to youtube but we did not see any significant benefit from doing that.
Options for the future
We have received some retrospective suggestions for alternative tech approaches to running an online event. Hopefully others will be inspired to run further online FOSS4G events and they will experiment with these.
Our choices were based on a need for a low effort tech approach given our small team and pressures on our time. Despite the poor publicity that zoom had received re security during the COVID crisis we found that the security features available were sufficient for our needs.
Eventbrite
The pros and cons
Free if you don't charge
A bit pricey for low cost tickets
OK email
Easy to capture data like permission for further FOSS4G mailing, country
Alternatives?
WhatsAppp
Team comms
Volunteers Group, could have considered a speakers group
Seems almost everyone uses
not everyone is on twitter despite what we think
Event structure
3 streams plus coffee bar, describe how it worked
Link to programme
Hosts and co-hosts
Link to Guide
Recording and publishing
automatic recording helps
What worked
List our reflections
What didn't work
List our reflections