Welcome to FOSDEM and thank you for volunteering to moderate talk chatrooms on chat.fosdem.org.
You'll be the host of one or more talks. You'll moderate the chatroom, collect questions for the Q&A and ensure that the experience is smooth for both speaker and attendee.
The talk itself will be prerecorded, but the Q&A afterwards is live video.
Before you can begin, you must create an account on penta.fosdem.org. You'll then have to enter the account name in your profile on volunteers.fosdem.org so we can link you to talks you agreed to moderate.
Go to penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22 to create an account. Fill in all the details and ensure you confirm your account.
If you already have an account (Pentabarf uses e-mail as primary identification), you can log in with your e-mail address and your password.
You need an account on chat.fosdem.org (or any other Matrix ID). You must make sure that the correct Matrix ID is on your Pentabarf profile, as that is the one will import.
To make sure we can automatically allow your account to preview the video's and have the correct access and moderation permissions on chat.fosdem.org, you must put your Penta username in your account information on volunteers.fosdem.org. Go to the website and access your account details (volunteers.fosdem.org/volunteers//edit). In the field Your pentabarf account name, enter the account name you either just created or already have on penta.fosdem.org. Click on Save changes.
It can take some time before everything is configured correctly, as the changes are made with batch jobs. If it is urgent (e.g. during FOSDEM), contact us in the #infodesk channel on chat.fosdem.org.
Before the conference, take some time to watch the video so you know what it's about. If there is a problem with the video or the quality is not good, contact the speaker immediately.
Got to penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22/events to see the list of talks you have been confirmed as host of. Click on each of the talks you see in the list to go to the talk details page.
On the details page, scroll down until you arrive at the Schedule block. Click on the Review button, which will take you to the video page.
You can view the video on this page. It could be that no video has been uploaded yet; if this happens close to the event, contact the speaker as soon as possible to make sure they will upload the video on time.
Test your setup, especially your microphone and webcam.
You should have received three invitations. One is for the main (public) chat room (think of this as the auditorium), where the viewers will be, and one is for the backstage chat room (think of this as the small room next to the auditorium), where you can talk with the speaker and any FOSDEM staff present in private. The third invitation is for the hallway track for the talk you are hosting.
- #test:fosdem.org - the main devroom ("frontstage") where the presentation will be shown and the public will be (note that this is a test devroom and doesn't actually work).
- #test-backstage:fosdem.org - the backstage ("backstage") chat room (by invitation only) where you can speak with the presenter in private.
- #test-talk_slug:fosdem.org - the hallway track for this particular talk. This is a public room.
Ensure you are present and available at least 30 minutes before the talk is due to start, so that we know if something is wrong before the the presentation happens.
If you are hosting multiple talks, you'll receive multiple invitations.
If the speaker is not in the room and it's close to when the talk is starting (5-10 minutes), let us know at the Infodesk channel. We'll try to contact the speaker, but if they don't show up it means there will be no Q&A. We suggest you announce this in the main public room ("frontstage").
Another possibility is that they have multiple Matrix ID's and the wrong one is in Penta. Contact a staff member via the Infodesk channel to fix that.
Around 15 minutes before the talk is due to start, our bot will check if the speaker (as configured in Pentabarf) is in the talk room. If that's not the case, we'll get alerted and someone from staff will probably show up to check if everything is OK. Note that if we do so, we can't see the chat history, so you might have to repeat yourself.
One of your more important jobs is moderating the chat. Usually FOSDEM attendees are civil and keep their discussions mostly on topic. However, from time to time they will need reminding or even are downright disruptive. You have some tools available in dealing with them.
You can discuss with the speaker if you want, or with someone from the FOSDEM team.
Usually it's sufficient to request that the discussion remains on topic and to remind everybody that Q&A is for questions and not for monologues.
If that does not help, try messaging the user in private or flagging the message.
Any message that violates the Code of Conduct (abusive, threatening, harassment) must be dealt with immediately. You always have the full backing of the FOSDEM staff when taking a decision, so you should not fear taking action when required.
To act on a single message, click on the three dots next to a message to bring up the message tools.
Any disruptive message can be reported to the FOSDEM moderation staff. Click on the exclamation mark (Report, or in Dutch, Melden) and the message will be brought to our CoC-team. This team will take the appropriate action and inform you.
Click on the info button (the i in the top right corner) to bring up the list of users in the room. Click on the user you want to contact.
You have one option for user interaction.
- Send a private message.
Click on Message (in Dutch Bericht) to open a private chat room between you and the user. You can then tell them what you wish to say, and they can react.
You can tell them that they should remain on topic, nuance or remove the message. If necessary, you can also warn them that future violations will result in a ban.
The backstage room. Click on the Video button to start a video conversation with the speaker.
Start a video conversation in the backstage room with the speaker. You can talk with them, but even if you don't do that, it will at least allow you to verify that both your and their audio and video setup are working.
The front stage room. This is where the public is.
The video will be started by the FOSDEM magicians automatically at the scheduled time. A bot will announce that the next talk is due to start. All talks are prerecorded, so during the talk the presenter is available to chat with in the backstage room.
During the talk, encourage attendees to ask questions and to upvote (messages can be upvoted by reacting to the messages with a thumbs up, or downvote them with a thumbs down - see here for more details). You can discuss the questions with the speaker while the presentation is in progress in the backstage room.
Speakers can always answer questions in the chat themselves during the presentation.
As soon as the video reaches its end, the bot will announce that Q&A is starting.
Before the Q&A starts (at the very latest when the bot posts the message), start a video conversation in the backstage room with the speaker. As soon as the presentation has ended, this video conversation will be streamed live in the "frontstage". You can then present some interesting questions to the speaker they can answer live on stage.
The technology for the video conversation is Jitsi.
Please be aware that there is a 30 second delay between the conversation you are having and the stream. This also means that your video conversation in the backstage room will start streaming 30 seconds before it is visible in the main room.
Depending on how long the video presentation took, you might not have a lot of time to answer questions. Be sure to time this right so you can answer the most interesting questions live. You will not be able to stop the next talk from starting, as this is all FOSDEM magic.
The discussion can continue in the virtual hallway, which is created for every talk. You should moderate the discussion in the hallway to make sure the Code of Conduct is respected.
It is possible that there is not really a lot going on in the hallway; don't feel pressured to keep the conversation going if there is not really much interest.
The FOSDEM team would like to thank you explicitly for taking on the role of "host" (or "moderator" or whatever) for one or more talks. We could not organise the conference without you, so thank you very much!