StreamYard made it easy to manage the backend. That meant that just about everyone would be able to see the Summit from wherever they were. YouTube worked for our community because it is easily accessible on a wide range of platforms in most of the world. After considering some options and consulting with experts in our community (huge thank you to Phil Torrone at Adafruit for the guidance), we concluded that a combination of YouTube and StreamYard would be the best option. VideoThe live stream of the Summit had to be both accessible to our viewers and easy to join for our speakers and panelists. A community space for discussions and coming together.Online streaming video of all of the speakers and panels.That was the right decision, but what does going all virtual mean? PrioritiesWe had two major priorities for the virtual Summit: By March 8 (5 days before the Summit) that was no longer tenable and we announced that the Summit was going all virtual. While the situation has been evolving for some time, as recently as March 5th (8 days before the Summit) we thought that holding a reduced in-person version of the event was the right decision. The event usually brings together hundreds of community members and speakers from around the world. This year OSHWA partnered with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law to host the event in New York City. Quick ContextThe Open Hardware Summit is an annual gathering of the open source hardware community held by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA).
In the hopes of helping event organizers struggling with the same challenges, this blog post outlines the decisions we made and the steps we took to make it happen. Unfortunately it looks like it is unlikely to be the last. Thanks to the timing of the Summit, the 10th anniversary Summit ended up being many people’s first virtual summit of the Covid-19 era (that includes the organizers).
We knew the 10th anniversary Summit would be one for the ages, although we didn’t quite expect it to be because it became the first virtual Summit. How We Made the Open Hardware Summit All Virtual in Less Than a Week First, thank you again to everyone – speakers, participants, and sponsors – for a fantastic 10th anniversary Open Hardware Summit.