[[!meta title="Notes and tips on preparing your talk"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2019, 2020 Amin Bandali"]] This page contains notes and tips for our speakers on preparing their talks and presentations. Please read through the list and consider it while preparing your talk. If you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions please feel free to write to one of the organizers directly (e.g. ), or write to one our organizational mailing lists: the public list, or the private list, depending on the nature of the matter you would like to discuss. Note: being part of a wiki, this page is subject to change (including by you!); so please check back every now and again for any changes and updates. ### Code of conduct First and foremost, we ask that you review our [[code of conduct|conduct]] when preparing your talk, to make sure we're all on the same page and strive to make the event a great experience for all. We would be happy to chat with you if you are unsure whether your talk or presentation style meets the guidelines laid out in the code of conduct. You can email Sacha Chua at to chat more about this. ### Prerecording talks For EmacsConf 2020, much like the last EmacsConf, we highly encourage and ask you to please consider prerecording your talk(s), *especially* for lightning talks, where the allotted time is quite limited and any potential technical issues that cannot be resolved quickly will greatly detract from the presentation. Please send us your prerecording(s) preferably by **November 14** (two weeks before the conference), or by **November 21** (one week before the conference) *the latest*, to allow us enough time to do any needed processing (e.g. format or codec conversion) in preparation for the event. Please **send your prerecording(s) via email to **, either in form of attachments (if reasonably small), or direct link(s) to download from elsewhere. If you need assistance with this, please write to about it. To make prerecordings, you could use any of the following pieces of free software, depending on your needs: - [OBS](//obsproject.com) - [SimpleScreenRecorder](//www.maartenbaert.be/simplescreenrecorder/) - [vokoscreenNG](//linuxecke.volkoh.de/vokoscreen/vokoscreen.html) - [peek](//github.com/phw/peek) - [ffmpeg](//trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Capture/Desktop) You might find the following free software programs useful for editing your video recordings: - [Kdenlive](//kdenlive.org/en/) - [Blender](//www.blender.org) - [Pitivi](http://www.pitivi.org) You can see more related tips from last year's [[**tips**|2019/tips]] page. Per GNU Project's [Guide to Formats](//audio-video.gnu.org/docs/formatguide.html), we prefer to receive prerecorded videos in formats unencumbered by software patents, such as `video/webm` (WebM-encoded video files, with `.webm` file extension) and `video/ogg` (video files encoded with the Theora video codec, encapsulated in an Ogg transport layer, with `.ogg` or `.ogv` file extension). However, if for one reason or another you are unable to send us your prerecorded video in one of the above formats, you may submit them in other common formats, like MPEG-4 (`.mp4`), and we will try to convert them to our preferred formats on your behalf. ### Office hours for video call tech-checks For EmacsConf 2020 live talks/sessions, we are evaluating a number of free software video-calling/conferencing tools, namely BigBlueButton, Jitsi Meet, and GNU Jami for the video calls with speakers delivering live presentations. Once we have made a decision about which software to use for EmacsConf 2020, we would like to do tech-checks with speakers to make sure they are able to use it to deliver their presentation(s). We ask that speakers who plan to participate in Q&A sessions and/or plan to present live schedule a short tech-check with us in the weeks leading to the conference, in order to quickly check their ability for joining video calls and performing common tasks such as sharing their screen. The office hours will likely be on Saturdays or Sundays, but we would be happy to try and work out another time if that doesn’t work for a speaker. To schedule a short tech-check, email one of the people on this list: - Corwin Brust <> - Leo Vivier <> - Your Name <> - Amin Bandali <> If you'd like to help out with the tech-checks, feel free to add your name and email to the above list and email to plan the logistics.