Publishing the videos with maximum advocacy impact

[ara4n]

I was absolutely blown away by the quality of talks at the conference, and I think they could be incredibly impactful in terms of Matrix advocacy. As a result, I think we should seriously consider presenting them in a "Watch the conference!" page on the website - as if the talks were almost the first-class outcome of the conference, rather than just a historical archive or a dump of videos on a youtube playlist (or a dump like https://video.fosdem.org/2024/h1309/, or having to click around through something like https://archive.fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/matrix/)

Practically speaking this could mean:

• A single glossy page that can get submitted to HN & other link aggregators - which perhaps becomes the frontpage of 2024.matrix.org.
• The page has a timeline of the talks (perhaps just grab the HTML + CSS of the schedule from pretalx)?
• With image thumbnails of all the videos (perhaps picking a maximally appealling hero thumbnail rather than just the first frame), which could then either switch to a youtube embed on being clicked, or just link through to youtube. (Using youtube for comments & tracking engagement for better or worse)

Eitherway, as a user, you could skim through all the thumbnails getting wowed by the sheer amount of content, and click on the talks you want to see based on the thumbnail as much as the talk name, and immediately start viewing them - rather than having to click through multiple levels of navigation to find the right talk and video (like the FOSDEM site), and without a nice glossy index.

TL;DR: can we have a really nice index page for all the talk videos, so that people who missed the conference feel like they are participating in it as a first class citizen, with the talk videos as a first-class citizen artefact - so that hopefully people binge the whole thing and enjoy it, rather than having to scratch around in youtube.

[HarHarLinks]

note: also make the slides accessible, but perhaps not needed to be as obvious as the videos.

another reference: https://media.ccc.de/c/emf2024