Re: Recording teleconferences?

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 15:13 +0200, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:08:24 +0200, Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:
> > I asked around internally. We don't have technical
> > infrastructure in place to do this and implementing
> > it seems to be non-trivial and lower priority than
> > lots of other sysadmin projects.
> 
> Thanks for figuring out! My idea was actually to simply record it via Skype and then publish it somehow.

Well, then there are the social/policy questions.
I have my reservations...

A published recording changes the teleconference from
a chat between colleagues into a performance for an
audience of unknown size. I can imagine that being
particularly daunting for people who aren't fluent
in English.

Written minutes strike a balance between
recording everything and recording nothing.
Well, good ones anyway; this group doesn't make binding
decisions in teleconferences, so we tend to be
pretty lax about minutes and expect technical arguments
to be elucidated/replayed in email. As to non-technical stuff,
I think it's reasonable that you have to be there in real time
to get that stuff.

Also, I gather the legal norm is explicit
"this teleconference is recorded for public consumption"
notice to all participants so that they can leave
if they don't like the idea. Some teleconference
services do this automatically, but we'd have to
do it manually. Our current practice is to identify
callers, but sometimes when somebody joins in the
middle, we let it slide. We'd have to tighten that
up.

Adding an "if you don't like being recorded, your
only option is to not participate in our teleconferences"
constraint is a pretty big change to the way we work;
some might even consider it a change to our charter;
I'd need plenty of explicit buy-in from people who
regularly participate in teleconferences and I'd have
to give some thought to whether it's fair to people
that the chairs might want to invite to a teleconference
for a particular occasion.


-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

Received on Friday, 14 August 2009 13:54:48 UTC