OW2con'22 June 8-9 - Online Platform

Given the uncertainties looming on international travel in the wake of the pandemic, OW2con will, this year again, be an online event. we will nevertheless meet the community during the face-to-face event "OW2 15 Year Anniversary", June 29-30 in Paris. 

In a nutshell:

• OW2con'22 June 8-9 will be held as a 100% online event,
• OW2 15 Year Anniversary is held as a 100% physical event, June 29-30 in Paris. 

OW2con'22, June 8-9

This is our third online conference and from the experience gained last year we know it is safe to keep it simple. However as this is a community conference we do provide resources for interactions:

• a series of online presentations,
• all presentations to be recorded prior to the event,
• all presentations properly filed and ready for broadcast on conference day, 
• all presentations to be supported by a dedicated chat channel for Q&A with the speakers,
• although presentations are recorded, speakers will be available online for Q&A with attendees.

Behind the scenes

We are reusing the platform that proved successful in 2020 and 2021. Our technical solution has several crucial advantages:

• it is as open source as possible,
• it requires no client software installation,
• it provides opportunities for interactions,
• it is easy to deploy and to operate,
• it is robust and fault tolerant.

The components of the solution we are working with include:

	Shotcut for video editing,
	OBS as a back-end for recording and streaming presentations to YouTube Live,
	YouTube for live broadcast and archive,
	Jitsi as a meeting application,
	Rocket.Chat as a browser-based integrated front-end displaying presentations and chats,
	Pretalx to manage the program,
	XWiki for the conference web site.

For more details and recommendations, check out OW2 CTO Antoine Mottier's blog

Call for Action

While we are reusing the platform and format we successfuly experimented last year, we will expand the exerience to providing Sponsored Chat Rooms to our Sponsors and we are exploring how to organise interactive video roundtables. It is still risky but we gained valuable experience with OW2con'20 and we are confident OW2con'21 will be successfuly executed.

Like everything we do at OW2, this year's online conference will again be a co-production between OW2 and its members. Here is what would greatly help:

• OBS experts to provide advice to news users,
• Community members to help edit videos,
• Speakers to deliver a recorded version of their presentation by the end of May at the very latest.