Video and YouTube Workflow for Online WordCamps: Request for Feedback

Since many WordCamps are moving online, the Community team is exploring different options on how best to support WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. organizers in publishing their videos online. Recent online WordCamps have successfully used YouTube to live stream their events, so the Community team is working on setting up a streamlined process for publishing WordCamp videos in WordPress.tv and YouTube. 

We would like to hear your feedback on our existing workflow and ask you to identify where we should improve or modify the current process.

Challenges

The Community team originally considered using the official WordPress YouTube channel (youtube.com/wordpress) for live streaming WordCamps. However, the following concerns were identified:  

  1. Since this channel has relatively few administrators, adding local community members as WordCamp chat moderators could take a long time for approval.  
  2. Online WordCamps work closely with vendors (either verified vendors recommended by the Community Team, or local vendors that are identified by WordCamp organizers). The WordPress YouTube channel is the official channel of the WordPress project. Sharing administrator access to a large group of people (including third party vendors) comes with a lot of risks, including copyright takedown, that will result in the loss of thousands of hours of videos.  

Current Approach

WordCamp CentralWordCamp Central Website for all WordCamp activities globally. https://central.wordcamp.org includes a list of upcoming and past camp with links to each. has its own legacy YouTube channel with live-streaming support. To address the challenges mentioned above, we currently expect that all upcoming online WordCamps will use the WordCamp Central YouTube channel for live streaming their events, as the risks involved here are a lot lower when compared to the official WordPress YouTube account. Here’s the existing workflow that we have in place for online WordCamps: 

  • Once organizers have confirmed their vendor, and after the WordCamp is scheduled, Community Team deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. will grant the vendor access to the WordCamp Central YouTube channel (We will typically revoke vendor access to the channel once the event concludes).
  • Community deputiesProgram Supporter Community Program Supporters (formerly Deputies) are a team of people worldwide who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Find more about program supporters in our Program Supporter Handbook. will provide moderator access to select members from the WordCamp organizing team for chat moderation, prior to the event (Access will be revoked as soon as the event concludes).
  • WordCamp organizers will work closely with the vendor to stream the event.
  • Once the event concludes, live-streamed videos from the WordCamp central channel will be unlisted. Attendees can re-watch the stream by visiting the WordCamp website. 
  • The vendor will then edit the individual session videos and upload them to WordPress.tv
  • The WordPress.tv team is currently working on an automated way of cross-posting the videos to the WordPress YouTube channel. When this is fully implemented, videos will be available both in the official WordPress YouTube channel, as well as on WordPress.tv, so that they will have a better reach. 

Potential Alternate Solution

The WordPress FoundationWordPress Foundation The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. Find more on wordpressfoundation.org. has now been approved for a G-Suite for Non-Profits account. This account can be used for the @wordcamp.org domain as well. This would allow the Community team  to provide G-Suite access to each individual WordCamp, so that they can make use of the bundled YouTube account to stream their event in their own channel. Using the G-Suite for Non-Profit account for YouTube would help us bypass the monetization requirement, thus helping each WordCamp to have their own individual YouTube channel for live streaming the events. 

While G-Suite powered YouTube channels can be used for live streaming events, WordCamp organizers will not be able to publish finalized individual session videos in their channel, if they want these videos to be published in the official WordPress YouTube channel. This is because individual YouTube videos can only be uploaded once on the platform

.Alternatively, WordCamps can potentially set up their own YouTube accounts for live streaming. However, YouTube has set up some barriers to embedding live streams on web pages unless the account is monetized, which prevents camps from using their accounts for live streaming. 

Note: This monetization requirement is fairly new, so events such as WordCamp Europe with long-established YouTube accounts did not face this problem.

Request for Feedback

What are your thoughts on the existing workflow for publishing WordCamp videos? Are there any shortcomings with this approach? Can you suggest any improvements to this process? 

Do you think that providing G-Suite accounts to individual WordCamps would be beneficial? Are you aware of any reasons why this may (or may not) work? 

We would like to hear from you all! Please share your suggestions as comments to this post by July 3rd, 2020 (Friday). 

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The following people his helped in publishing this post: @andreamiddleton @angelasjin @camikaos @carike @courtneypk @casiepa @megabyterose @nukaga @shinichin @tacoverdo