Do you know SAP Inside Tracks (SIT) and their events? Maybe you saw one of the announcement blog posts here, or have been participating in one yourself? The whole SAP Inside Track phenomenon is pretty amazing. There where 40+ SAP Inside Track events worldwide last year, locally organised by passionate SAP community members. Think about them as one day conferences, where people come together on a Saturday to share their experience and insights with other people, crazy enough to listen to talks about SAP topics even on the weekend?! While participating in person is for sure the best possible way to experience an SAP Inside Track, wouldn't it be nice to at least see the sessions being presented there? OpenSIT is an effort to make this content better accessible.
But before go into more details what OpenSIT actually is, let me tell you how we got here.
SAP Inside Track Berlin 2017
I have been an SAP Inside Track participant and speaker myself for many years. When I moved to Berlin, I didn't know anybody here from the larger SAP community (beside my SAP colleagues in the office). There also wasn't any SAP Inside Track in Berlin, so I thought it would be good to organise one in the German capital. SAP Inside Track Berlin 2017 (#sitBER) was born.
Grit, Bruno & Oliver
No 2 SIT are the same. Each of them are organised by different people, and all organiser teams put their own personal spin on it. We focused on an outstanding onsite experience, great content, and the possibility for people worldwide to watch the sessions online. Fortunate for me, I could focus on session content and streaming setup, while Bruno would take care of organising the location, food, and the overall onsite experience. Grit would manage the live stream and video direction. To cut the story short, it all went pretty well, and as one result, the session recordings of sitBER 2017, 2018, & 2019 are available online for everybody to watch.
Let's talk about the whole streaming and recording thing. While there is a learning curve, it isn't rocket science anymore. Anybody can do a live stream on YouTube, Twitch or any of the myriads of services out there. It gets more complicated, once you try to produce a decent quality, with PIP, titles, scene switches, and not to forget good sound. You can see and hear that there has been continuous improvements over the years with the recording quality of sitBER sessions, and I learned a lot about this topic since then. At sitPOTT 2019 I had the opportunity to do the session "Live Streaming Inside Tracks", and fortunately gregorw and 1c23e4f036644568ac36f3b2e9939062 where so kind to record and publish the talk on YouTube.
Thorsten Schubert live streaming sitHH
The most recent SIT that got live streamed and recorded was SIT Hamburg, where torsten.schubert took care of the technical setup. torsten.schubert, gregorw and I started documenting the technical setup, and there is the SAP Community Events Live Streaming How-To available now. The idea is to share our setups and learnings and make it easier for other SIT to adopt a similar setup and share their sessions online.
#sitBER wasn't the first SIT to get live streamed. To my knowledge, tobias.hofmann(?) started this at SAP Inside Track Sau Paolo already in 2011! The SIT Brasil YouTube account has over 50 videos online, and is an amazing resource (if you speak Portuguese!) In total I found 11 SIT YouTube channels (incl. #sitBER) that shared their sessions online for everybody to watch after the event happened. But it isn't easy to find them, let alone have a access to all available sessions at once. Well, it wasn't. This is where OpenSIT comes into play.
The mission of OpenSIT is to make the session content recorded
at SAP Inside Tracks easily accessible to SAP community members.
All SIT session recordings are currently hosted on YouTube. opensit.net makes all SAP Inside Track session recordings accessible from a single place.
opensit.net website
There are 100+ videos available, organised by SAP Inside Tracks and event year. You'll find links to their Twitter hashtag, YouTube account and Twitter channel, if available. Each session video lists the session speakers with links to their SAP Community profiles or Twitter accounts. opensit.net is an aggregation of publicly available information, put into a fairly straight forward design. I'll keep the content up to date, once new videos become available (not all of the SIT Brasil videos are included yet). The website is pretty solid at this point, after the initial release at SIT Netherlands, and I have some ideas how to further enhance it. I very much encourage you to check it out, and explore the SIT sessions available.
The SAP community has a strong presence on Twitter, and I have a certain affection for Twitter. I'm using the @opensitnet Twitter account for updates on new sessions or events available on opensit.net, and to post random sessions from the site. I hope this helps with promoting the content and make it more visible.
OpenSIT is all about encouraging and helping more SAP Inside Tracks to live stream, record and share their sessions online, make them easy to access, and promote them to a larger audience. And for me it is a fun project in my spare time, to try some state of the art web development frameworks and services.
Maybe this gets traction, and other SAP Inside Tracks start recording their sessions. Go check out opensit.net and let me know in the comments what you think. I've opened up DM for @opensitnet, where you can also contact me. Looking forward to your feedback.
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