[Chapter-delegates] ISOC LIVE - the reports of its death are exaggerated, but..

Sat Mar 9 05:41:14 PST 2024

If I may carve out the section of Oliver's BoT missive that pertains to me.

*4.2 Termination of contract for Joly McFie - isoc.live*

*At the recent Chapters Advisory Council meeting, we learned that Joly
McFie's services were no longer going to be contracted for Live Streaming.
The powers that be at ISOC found that most people were watching recorded
videos than the live video streaming, which in my opinion makes sense
because live watching requires people to do it at a time T but many people
like to watch the event later - and also when Live, many people had a
preference to be on the original Zoom channel to take an active part in
asking questions remotely. The Live Channels archive was great for ISOC's
image. A great showcase of: "This is what we do!" - with "we" conveying the
global dimension of the Internet Society through its memorable Chapter
events.It seems to have been decided unilaterally that in order to cut on
costs, Joly will not longer be contracted full time to LiveStream and
Archive events with the added excellent professional service of adding
captions and making a recording very polished indeed and ready for public
consumption.We learned that Joly can still be contracted on a project basis
by both ISOC teams and chapters. The budget would come from the party who
enters into the contract with Joly. Chapters can include these costs in
their event budgets when applying for a Beyond the Net
Small<https://www.isocfoundation.org/grant-programme/beyond-the-net-small-grants/
<https://www.isocfoundation.org/grant-programme/beyond-the-net-small-grants/>>
grant.ISOC will continue to record its public marquee events and post the
recordings thereof for on-demand viewing.ISOC's messages are unclear: on
the one hand it says that it has more money to support the community than
the number of applications it receives for funding and on the other hand it
cuts a major volunteer and chapter support programme and replaces it with
yet more bureaucracy. It is replacing an ISOC Community Resource for
everyone with an elitist on-demand selection process with lengthy
application documents that will just push back on Chapter activity.4.2.1
Was this change in process / withdrawal of service agreed with the Chapter
Advisory Council or with Chapters in any way?4.2.2 What will happen with
the current excellent archive of livestreams which constitute an amazing
library of Chapter events of many many years?4.2.3 Why introduce the
unreasonable bureaucratic overheads in the process of booking Joly McFie's
services with an events budget request? Some Chapters have regular Webinars
and adding an official request for an event budget is a waste of volunteer
time. Plus there is a limitation as to how many requests a Chapter can
make. Plus all the necessary bureaucratic reports that need to be filed
afterwards.4.2.4 Couldn't the Internet Society just have an on-demand
contract with Joly McFie and make payment on a per event basis, without
needing all the bureaucracy to file for "events budget"?*

What I will say first is that 'on-demand' is essentially a non-starter. I
am essentially a self-starter and most streams are interventions rather
than requests. Agility is key. Take, just for one example, Friday's Alumni
Network Women Pioneers <https://isoc.live/17412/> event. I first got the
info at 8am and was streaming at 10, and it was only confirmed that
archiving was ok two thirds of the way through the session!

Then the question of livestreamed versus recorded content. How it works is
that the livestreaming drives the recorded content, 1) material is edited
on the fly, rather than a delayed process, giving 2) an instantly
accessible archive, which can then be further segmented and properly
archived.

In the case of Zoom calls, active participation is not always practical. A
livestream, or even simply real time text, can be a good way to keep up and
stay informed. And also, unless a Zoom cloud recording, with all options
such as hiqh quality, separate screen and speaker etc, is made available,
the switched livestream is going to be way superior quality. I note that,
in the case of SGs/SIGS the provided Zoom accounts have cloud recording
disabled.

Originally the livestreaming was a NY chapter activity. Then, around 2010,
I was contracted by Anne Lord  to manage other Chapters livestreams, over a
single Livestream channel. A couple years later Paul Brigner took over the
North America Bureau with a strong policy of engagement via livestreaming,
including active outreach to other communities to stream their events, and
investment in production capability. I ended up working pretty much full
time.

When Paul left, COO Todd Tolbert contracted me, as part of IT support, to
keep running the now wider livestreaming activity, with the additional
remit of establishing one place that people could go to find streams, and
thus https://isoc.live was born.

Then Todd left, and I was bounced over to Comms. This has never been a good
fit. Comms work is getting the word out. My work is basically bringing
stuff in, making it available, and preserving it. I used to joke that the
only time I heard from Comms was when they told me NOT to stream stuff. The
idea being that limiting access brought value to being an ISOC member. The
exception was the PIR campaign, when suddenly I was in demand. Nevertheless
I have done a fair deal of recording and editing of ISOC regional events,
even if only to post some of them unlisted on YouTube.

Given this, Comms tolerance of this 'streamer in residence' budget item is
laudable, I guess. Up til now, that is. The shoe dropped at the start of
the year. I was told, in the choice of 'need to have' and 'nice to have',
the latter had to go, and I was in that category, and funding would cease
at end of Q1 2024.

How much, you might ask? Well I've been on $63,600 per annum. Out of this I
pay all my expenses, including servers, power, accounts like Otter,
Descript, etc, living expenses in NYC, not a cheap city, and tax. In
addition to this, ISOC has been paying for the 3 Livestream.com premium
channels @ $900 per annum = $2700. So, a total of $66,300.

What this does not cover is if I have to gather up my kit and schlep out
and do production on location, and this has occasionally been funded by
yes, Beyond The Net (IGF-USA), or even the North America Region (State of
the Net), or just Chapter funds.Other community groups such as A11yNYC,
BetaNYC, and Silicon Harlem fund it themselves, while the NY Chapter
sponsors the webcast channel via ISOC.

But, there can be a problem, as currently, in the case of 2024 State of the
Net. Due to the unfortunate death of John More, ISOC-DC was without a
treasurer ubtil the appointment of Jon Conradt at the end of the year, and
his BTN Fluxx application foundered, and I am yet to get paid. I am
guessing this was due to new stringent '8 week advance' requirement over at
ISOC Foundation. When I asked North America Region to cover, I was told, oh
well, you should have asked in advance. This event, the most prestigious
Internet Policy event in North America, involves travel to DC, covering 4
tracks of content. re-editing and archiving, at a cost $4.5k. The Internet
Society logo appears on every minute of the livestream and archived video
<https://bit.ly/sotn2024vids>, which includes, Congressmen, top White House
and Agency officials, etc. If ISOC DC has to cough up, it will make a
serious dent in their funds, all because of ISOC red tape.

Olivier mentioned the archive. So, that original channel, that Anne Lord
paid for, was on the 'old' livestream which was like a TV newsroom. What
Paul got, and we currently still use is the 'new' livestream, which is
event based. A few years back, the 'old' system was sunset, and downloading
the archive was awkward, and then they just deleted the whole thing.
Realizing that if we ever stopped paying for the 'new;, I changed my
workflow so that all events were more or less immediately ported over to the
Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/@isoc_live> where, hopefully
they will exist in perpetuity.

Late last year, Vimeo, who had bought Livestream Inc, announced that they
were in turn shutting that service down, and would not renew accounts after
the end of the year. Fortunately our accounts renewed in December, so we
are good until December 2024 with the current channels, after which there
will have to be a switch to some other platform, maybe AWS. I don't
actually favor YouTube, because 1) copyright issues can kill a stream 2)
ads 3 ) tracking. I do currently do Twitter, Twitch and Facebook, but as
secondary simulcasts, due to the same issues.

I have had some back and forth with Vimeo, and it seems we will be able to
grab the content, in some form, by first transferring it to a Vimeo Premium
account (ISOC has one) and then downloading in bulk. I have procrastinated
this til the summer. Not confirmed, but in my call with Comms, it was
mooted that ISOC might pay for the work involved.

The main point is, *in December, ALL legacy ISOC livestream.com
<http://livestream.com> links/embeds will break*. Any Chapters that have
legacy livestream content will have to update to the same content on
archive.org. If you have live stuff on your Chapter website and would like
to jump the queue, then it's as simple as making a request to
support at isoc.live with details, to get wheels in motion.

As to what will happen to ISOC LIVE from April 1 2024 on? Well, I plan to
continue much as usual, but this is somewhat contingent on finding
alternate funding. Perhaps the ISOC Fondation may have an epiphany that
it's something they should continue to support, perhaps other donor(s) may
emerge. Or some combination. Maybe a Large grant.  In order to facilitate
this, the NY Chapter Board, at a recent meeting, approved a motion to
fiscally sponsor ISOC LIVE as a chapter project, thus a) maintaining the
ISOC nexus, and b) making such contributions tax deductible in the US.

Interested to hear what the BOT will say today. BTW BoT meetings are a
good example of inferior zoom recordings. Years ago I asked to be able to
stream them and was rebuffed. But that was before the new transparency era.
I guess I could do a recording and post the reports.

Still streaming

Joly

-- 
--------------------------------------
Joly MacFie  +12185659365
--------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/private/chapter-delegates/attachments/20240309/42e9f20b/attachment.htm>