For many years the Python community has had an awesome website called pyvideo.org which tried to aggregate all conference videos on a single site. In January Will Kahn-Greene, one of the awesome people behind it, announced, that work on the project was about to end. Then in March he continued with a lengthy status update announcing the pyvideo-data repository. That repository contains a data dump of all the collected videos and should act as a starting point for other people to work with.
I hadn’t heard anything about that up until PyCon 2016 when Cameron Dershem gave a lightning talk asking people to join him during the sprints if they wanted to work on pyvideo and related projects. So the conference days went and the sprint days came and all of a sudden there were about 15 people working on pyvideo-related topics!
By that time Paul Logston had already created a statically generated site using the pyvideo data-set and Pelican called PyTube.org. Quickly teams started to form and within an hour we had a website team that focused on pytube.org, a scraper team, working on importing new content from conference websites, and an archiving team, trying to come up with solutions to prevent conference videos from disappearing from the net as did happen when blip.tv went dark.
Over the following days pytube grew and shortly after the sprints the maintainers of pyvideo.org even marked their own data-repository to be deprecated in favour of the pytube-fork. A repository we had set up mainly because at that time no-one in the room had commit rights to upstream data store 😉
Now, more than a week after the sprints have ended, there are still a handful of us committing code every day and I’m still amazed how far we’ve come from the minute we all entered that sprint room in Portland.
That being said, there is still a lot of work ahead. Tons of conferences are still missing, for many the metadata could be improved (who gave which lightning talk?), the website could use the screen-estate more efficiently, …
If you want to help, simply go to the pytube org on Github and pick what interests you 🙂
Big thanks to everyone who was at the sprints and Will and Sheila for their support and all the work they’ve put into pyvideo!
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