 Okay, we're ready to get started with our second collaboration session, and I'm happy to turn it over to Nate Warras. Thanks. So this is going to be a first for me in the sense that it's intended to be a discussion session, and I'm going to attempt to talk really fast at the beginning just to sort of lay the groundwork in case you just got stuck here because you couldn't get into the dev room you really want to be at. But if you've been to any like false events in the past couple of years, you may have encountered a photo policy, which is about when you should take photos of other people, when you should not, and that sort of thing. It's a relatively recent innovation in policy teams, and in my encounters, I've seen some policies that are a little bit hard to understand, and so I sort of thought maybe if we talked in the open about the components of these policies and how you as an event organizer can decide what you need and what you don't need, maybe that would save some of the growing pains. 25 minutes might not be enough to do that and solve all the problems, but we can continue this discussion later. This is really just the opening salvo. Clearly these policies are coming from the right place. We want everyone to feel comfortable in our communities either in person or online, and for some people that can have a lot to do with their image. On the other hand, policies are not necessarily in their current states easy to muddle through. They tend to be a little ad hoc these days, maybe a bit disconnected from other policy decisions at the events, and they can be confusing. I'm not sure how easy it is to read that if you're at the back of the auditorium. That's from DebConf this year, and it says, well, first of all, there's a camera with a Ghostbusters line through it, but then it also says, Debbie and we'll have a roving photographer capturing both posed and spontaneous photos to document DebConf and to use in promotion on materials in the future. Please respect the wishes of others, express verbally or view the badge when taking your own photographs. So does that mean the professional photographer does it not have to? That's someone else. I have to respect other people's badges, but Debbie is also having someone take their own pictures. I don't know. I tried to find out who wrote that policy and no one really knew. This is the short link for a pirate pad that has sort of the things that I thought would be worth discussing. Please feel free to add your own notes to that. I did use an Earl stretching service. But like I said, we only have 25 minutes here, so I'm going to lay out a little bit of the big topics and then open the floor to everyone who wants to comment or ask questions. To me, I think the biggest question to decide if you're an event is whether or not you're interested in a photo policy is because of the image itself or because the image is published somewhere or because it's associated with a person. Because those are very different things and they have different concerns. It's generally not the case that the fact that an image was recorded is what concerns one, although it could be. I mean, there are security cameras everywhere, but we feel differently when that image gets published, right? And if that's the case for your events, then the root issue might be to think about the policy in terms of tagging people online and about how they're identified or not identified online rather than making it a photo policy with those other matters being an afterthought. There are several sort of broad categories where in the etherpad I just sort of put more specifics and I'll talk about these one-at-a-time scoping, which is a word I borrowed from Tom. Generally, if there's a declaration for someone to make as their photo preferences, it's done with a device on the badge somehow, either the lanyard or a sticker or something like that. But you also see this where there's sort of sections of a room and it's important to be clear, I think, how those interact. If you move from one into the other, what are you expressing when you have the don't take my photo picture photo badge but you sit in the photos or a case section? It's either one of those options is okay, you just need to be clear about that. But you also have similar issues come up with, for instance, in the Q&A period. There's someone with a no-photo thing, should they not be recorded by the video team? Does this apply? Can you be a volunteer and a staff person and a room proctor and not have people take your photo? There's a lot of variables to be managed there in drafting your policy. There's also the issue of how the photo policy interacts with other things. In most cases, I can tell you because of conduct, the photography policy, sometimes they're both available on the website but they don't really seem to connect. Is it the same policy? Is it a section of it? I noticed the Libra Planet Code of Conduct does mention photographic harassment as an example of bad behavior but it's not the same thing as the photo policy. And there's also things to consider like if you are agreeing to be a speaker, you have some sort of release generally. Does that mean you don't have the rights to make other decisions about photographs? And in some cases, there's something what we would call a general release which is if you're going to a public event, if you're going to a sporting event, for example, there's some sort of release somewhere that you agreed to when you bought a ticket that says, hey, people might take your picture here. So harmonizing those things is a topic all into itself. There's also the issue of you want to write policies that are clear but not overly complex. This is from Guadec last year. You'll see there's three different badge colors available. I'm okay with pictures. I'm not okay with pictures and please ask. It might be that three is too many. It might be that you could just say by default ask and then you only need two badges so that can get to be confusing for people which is not what we want. And then there's the issue of we need to balance the policy that someone writes as sort of an event-wide thing with the different needs of individual groups that participate in the event. This is a snippet from an email from the events team where I was a speaker and they're like, hey, you need to send this picture. It's important. And I pushed back on this quite a bit just to see what happens. And eventually I got a letter from the executive director saying it's actually fine if you don't want to send a picture in and the event wants to put your picture online if you're a speaker and that's understandable. The press, sometimes if it's an event like this where no one registers, people might just come because they're the local media and they record something. In other cases, you have to invite people to come give your coverage, give your event coverage. In that case, you've kind of entered into a relationship where they have some expectations about being able to do their job. So those are important concerns to balance as well. The last one there is if someone's travel to the event is sponsored, we frequently tell them write a blog post at the end and tell us you were there. So making sure that we're clear about them taking pictures when they're told they're required to take pictures is also covered. Finally, there may be policies by the venue or in public spaces. It may not be clear if I'm in a public space if I'm out there or if I'm in the venue space. So these are things you may not have legal grounds as an event to say this applies to people on campus who are not part of FOSDEM. I don't think that FOSDEM could unilaterally declare that other people wandering through campus have to abide by the photo policy. And the last thing is just clarity in what you write. What does it mean exactly for someone to be in a photo or even to be identifiable in a photo? You might have seen this. This was back in March. I think we're a man sued MIT for using this photo without permission. It was in the best of all ironies. It was an article about hipsters all looking the same. Turns out it was someone else and it was not him. So there's going to be disagreements and it's important to account for what is identifiable mean and how we decide. And I think one final thing I wanted to mention there is record keeping. Does anyone remember what color lanyard from the Gwadex slide a few slides ago was the one that meant, okay, take my picture? Yeah. So if you're looking at pictures from two years ago, the lanyard color might not be enough to make that a real usable policy. Those are all the introductory comments I have to make. Here again is the link to the etherpad if you want to add your own comments or weigh in on things or provide informational links. I'm aware that a lot of the time we have is already gone. So I asked some friends of mine who run Pixels US, which is a discussion forum for open source software projects that deal with photography like Darktable and raw editors and that sort of thing. They have a discourse forum. I think it's discourse. Whichever one is actually free software, that's the one it is. And they set up a sort of legal category and if anyone is interested in having this discussion further, I think that would be a worthwhile place to do it because some of these questions that are very photo-centric, the photography community has dealt with before like what does it mean for someone to be visible in a photo or not. Those are all the introductory comments I have. So I would like to open the floor up for questions and comments and that definitely includes me clarifying things that I said in the preceding few minutes. So the floor is yours. Thank you very much. You brought quite an interesting and underestimated topic. I just want to add a few comments. Also because of my private practice, I had the fun experience to draft photography policy for a cosplay event of Game of Thrones for a public library. But I would say that one thing we have to consider, you mentioned GDPR, but apart from GDPR, we have to consider also freedom of information. So if photography for documenting the event is one thing you can object and things like that, but when it comes to freedom of information, just people informing that there is a conference, then other consideration came into play. And the second point I would still consider is the fact that of course you are dealing only with the topic of pictures taken by the organization. But there is also the topic of picture taken by other attendees and then shared on social networks. If you just do it on a personal base, then you are protected by the outside exception under the GDPR. But as long as you share it, well things can get a little tricky. What do you think about it? So that is a good point. I did not intend for the list of topics to be limited to official photographers by the events. Because generally the policy is written as something for events attendees. And if there is an exception, there is an exception carved out for the staff people and for a professional event photographer. But I want this topic to encompass everything because I think that, like you said, where it gets nebulous is the people who are there for their own private purposes and take pictures of their friends. It is a weird thing to ask people that they have to get permission from their friends to take the pictures. And what you said about freedom of information, that raises another thing that I wanted to bring up, which is that there are people for whom the notion of saying, don't take my picture at this event fuels incongruous with the notion that we are here to have a free and open community event. And so reaching that person and saying, yes, we are working in the open, but in this case, please don't mention this person's name. It can be tricky. Or mention this person's name or their picture. Does that address what you mean? Okay. Hi. To be maybe a little bit provocative or whatever, these sort of photo policies have sort of started to become around in the last year or two. I assume maybe concerns about facial recognition and so forth is driving at least some of it. But, you know, almost seems to me, it kind of realistically, yes, you could essentially just ban photography events or photography only of speakers, but is a practical policy even doable beyond that? Or does this really boil down to, you know, sort of a feel-good type of thing of people think they can be kept from being photographed? In reality, there are going to be lots of photographs at any given event. Well, I'm not a liar, but this to me feels like where a lawyer would bring up the notion of, like, reasonable expectations. So, like, we know we can't proactively prevent people from behaving badly, but we can set expectations in a code of conduct policy and then generally lay out the terms of what we expect. And it's a good point that, like, maybe in some of the earliest codes of conduct that I saw events adopt, they spent a lot more time trying to express the full set of what's okay and what's not okay. And that was sort of not helpful. It was a lot more helpful to set the general terms and then devote more energy into responding to incidents and explaining to people how to report incidents and that sort of thing. So I would think it's in the same category or maybe getting too detailed on the photography issues itself is not money well spent, but setting the expectations at a community level and then having mechanisms in place to handle the disagreements that can come up is the more beneficial approach, maybe. Hi. So it seems from everything you've presented that these policies are both rather difficult to draft, also rather difficult to implement and can have some ambiguities or even consistencies and might lead people to have certain expectations as to what is or isn't being permitted and that those expectations might be frustrated in a way that leaves people perhaps more disappointed than they would be if those expectations weren't there in the first place, which is to ask, have any studies been conducted as to the effect of having these policies in place at all? Does it increase participation? Does it increase diversity participation? Do people approve of them and enjoy them or have they perhaps created more frustration than they've solved? I have no idea and that's a good question. I guess I would hope that someone who's taking notes can add that to the etherpad before I forget to do so. But yeah, since I view this session as sort of an attempt to start the discussion, I hope that we can maybe look into that. One of the events that I regularly go to, Gwadek has a posted photo policy and has had one for, I think, three years-ish. Somewhere in there. And like I mentioned, the DEB Confirm seemed very ad-ed-hoc and a little bit confusing. But I do know because Gwadek has been doing this that there are other events that have done this and they may have some data anecdotal or numeric. We'll see. Good point. We have five minutes or slightly less. Speaking not in legal terms, but mostly in principle terms, I see that the freedom of some people not to be photographed, but don't you think that there's also a freedom for everybody else to be able to share experiences of a public conference and to send photos to friends, to send group photos, and even of the organizers to document what's happening, keep it recorded. In these policies, often I see a lot of emphasis on the privacy side, but not a lot of emphasis on the fact that it's a public event and there's actually a legitimate interest of other people to share the content. The door was closing there. You're asking... No, I was asking your opinion on this. Don't you think that there should be also some attention in protecting the right of people not probably being photographed and actually want to share content from the event and join others? Also because, by the way, I think there are a few people that have a real need not to be photographed, like whistleblowers or these kinds of people, and if we end up in a situation in which half of the room is asked not to be photographed, the result will be that the people that really have a real need will just be lost in a bigger crowd and maybe people will just say and screw it and photograph everyone and people that are really, really squeaky. That would be an undesirable outcome, but yeah, it's potentially... Yeah, I think I agree. It's definitely about balancing and not about declaring. So it's about balancing the needs of the different groups. Anyone else? Alrighty. Well, I thank you for your attention and like I said, the discussion forum at Pixels of the U.S. is set up for this purpose. I'm sure that other legal questions will eventually make their way into that forum, but please, if you are someone interested in community policies or in event planning or in photography and you have questions or concerns on this topic, go to Pixels.us and we will all see you there. Thanks. Thank you, Nate.