Now that Akademy is well and truly over, hopefully everyone has had something of a chance to rest!
Seems we had some technical difficulties when it comes to the online participation and recording. I wasn’t there in person to assist with the issues unfortunately, but I think we should have a post-mortem on the problems to identify the issues and hopefully ensure we do better next time. These are a few things I noticed:
Video
The visual quality was so low that the image was mostly smudged pixels. I am not sure how this is even possible in this day, since even the cheapest cameras for many years now have been able to easily do full HD at minimum.
Audio
There were issues with the audio quality being difficult to understand people speaking, microphones having feedback and making terrible noises, and sometimes not seeming to work at all.
The YouTube auto-captions feature is famous for being frequently error prone, though it was even more so here because of the low audio quality, which proves a large accessibility barrier.
BoFs
Something hardware related prevented the online participation of BoFs entirely, though it wasn’t said what. It was mentioned (I forget where!) that further event recordings would be posted shortly to YouTube, I am not sure if they are having difficulty as well since they aren’t up yet. It would be great, because I for one am feeling increasingly out of the loop based on the things people have been mentioning from the extra content beyond the main 2 days that were live streamed.
This leaves some questions, such as:
- What was the nature of the various hardware shortcomings and failures?
- Were there software-based issues?
- Is assistance required for things like video editing, adding timestamps, etc?
- Do we need to purchase audio/visual hardware to improve support for online participation and recordings?
- What can we do to ensure a smoother experience in the future, both for those consuming the online media and those making presentations? (eg delays and awkwardness due to microphone feedback issues and etc)
Having these things work smoothly, reliably, and with good quality/accessibility seems important for allowing those who weren’t able to travel to keep in the loop. In addition Akademy is a fairly public window into the KDE world, and it would be nice to present that well.
I hope that some folks can chime in with details of the situations, and that we can come up with plans to ensure a better experience next time! 
It looks like people had a great time, and a lot was covered.
icon for the talk