Shifting Focus from Livestreaming to Recordings, YouTube Growth
Austin Forum friends, we are changing how we deliver the monthly presentation events for online attendees. When the coronavirus pandemic happened, we realized that the community could and should be sustained and that online tools could help, so we changed to having our presentations delivered online—and we added online small-group discussions about technology and society books. After vaccines and other conditions eased health concerns, we resumed in-person events with networking but started streaming the live in-person presentations to those who wanted to continue participating online. Our programming has thus grown to include hybrid presentations, in-person networking, online book discussions, in-person meetups and workshops, and online podcasts.
However, while the world has embraced remote meetings and work, hybrid large-scale events remain challenging to execute well. Technical issues with sound and video in large event venues can make for poor experiences online, and dealing with those glitches can make for poor experiences for in-person attendees as well. Also, networking for online attendees in hybrid events has never been effective. Additionally, we see with attendance at SXSW and numerous other conferences, workshops, and large-scale meetings, that even remote workers are willing, even wanting, to gather in person for occasional larger-scale gatherings and events.
So, we have made the decision to pause our real-time hybrid large-scale events—but we will continue to do our best to record these monthly presentations and post them on our YouTube channel so people can continue to enjoy this content from anywhere they choose. Separately, Google recently eliminated Google Podcasts and moved all podcasts to YouTube, so we now have far more content on our YouTube channel! Thus, we are going to lean into YouTube for our presentation recordings and our podcast recordings. We will aim to curate a YouTube channel that is informative and professional. We will of course continue to offer a mix of in-person and online events, and we will be even more regular about recording podcasts. Finally, we will leverage our Slack community (2300+ people in it!) more to help us all connect, no matter our locations or schedules!
We hope this one change to the delivery of presentation event content is satisfactory to our online community, and we remain committed to delivering great content to our online attendees and a space for everyone, everywhere, to learn, feel connected, and be inspired.
Jay Boisseau, Ph.D.
Executive Director
