The Ultimate Free and Open Source conference explanation video4 min read

Have you ever wondered what the best community-oriented open source conference events look like? Ever wanted to attend one, but never dared to? Or need something to convince your boss to support you in attending as part of your work?

For many veteran FLOSS contributors who are part of big established projects, it is easy to take things for granted and just go to those events without hesitation; we forget how mysterious and intimidating this can be for casual or new contributors. We don’t typically spend the time to articulate what makes these events great, and why we spend so much effort organizing and attending them.

It also seems quite mysterious to our non-technical friends and family members. They sometimes know that we’re travelling to some mythical “computer conference” event in some faraway land, suspiciously held in a different city every year (as is the case with GNOME’s GUADEC), but it’s hard to explain why we’re mostly going there for a few days to spend time “indoors in some auditorium” instead of sipping margaritas on the beach.

Well, I have the solution for this longstanding communication problem.

After weeks of preparation, a few days of shooting, and over 13 days of full-time editing, I have produced the Ultimate FLOSS conference explanation video:

Video thumbnail
Click the image above to view the video

It is a dynamic, cinematic, professional-grade short documentary, meant to serve as evergreen material that you can point people to. I hope you will appreciate the level of attention to detail present in this edit!

It is longer than the typical “2-minutes conference highlights” video, but I believe the quality and depth of topics being discussed, combined with my tight script and editing, will make it a pleasure for you to watch from beginning to end. It’s shorter than a TV episode yet still makes for good nighttime entertainment!

  • In order to make the topic accessible, the cinematic part is preceded by a narrated introduction to establish the context in terms anyone can understand. This is so that you can safely share the video with newcomers, friends, family, new acquaintances you meet for years to come—no matter their knowledge level.
  • After the educational introduction, it then continues to the “cinematic” documentary part.

“What if I’m already a Lv.70 geek?”

If you’re in a big hurry and you already know all about Free & Open Source software, you can skip to the 5:05 mark, and if you already know about GStreamer and don’t care to know why I made the video “around GStreamer” in the first place, you can jump directly to 8:14… But if you have a few minutes extra, it’s certainly worth watching from the start (you’d be missing some jokes otherwise).

Alternatively, if you only want the “GStreamer conference” part of the video (to share that one with someone interested in the GStreamer community specifically?), you can have a look at the one I published over there.

I recommend listening to this with good speakers or headphones. While I am no musician, my editing style is centered around sound, rhythm and (e)motion:

  • I adapt motion, beats and flow to fit the desired atmosphere and impact. In terms of editing style, I primarily “cut to the music”, but also sometimes rearrange the music itself to fit the motion.
  • I tweak all the sound levels & frequencies to ensure you can always hear speech effortlessly—whether you are on my studio monitoring speakers or headphones, or on some crappy 1w laptop speakers (which I obviously do not recommend).

While I’m at it, I might as well mention that I’m open for contractual video production or editing work (in addition to being available as a long-term specialized marketer 😉


P.s.: if you’re French, no need to challenge me to a duel after watching the intro! I actually like your transportation system. Especially the fact that you actually have trains. We don’t have that here.

Jeff