I suspect the venue plays a role in people's decision to come or not. It certainly did it for me. Although I'd be terribly interested in the content of the conference, the prospect of having to fly to some other city and waste pretty much an extra day in local transportation is at the moment keeping me away. In my case I'd rather have paid a few hundred dollars more to the organization in exchange for a more accessible location. I might still come, and the decision will not be influenced in any way by knowing that recording will be available at a later stage. On making recordings available, I have a few comments: - video is problematic, requires equipment and effort and frankly doesn't add much. Unless people plan to do presentations with cheer leaders around them, that's it. - audio is almost free. At worst, the notebook from which the presentations are beamed have a microphone and can record while powerpoint wastes cycles. But it shouldn't be difficult to hook a separate computer to the conference sound mixer. And publishing slides+audio would be terrific. - if pre-registrations were good you can decide to go ahead and record the audio anyhow (for training the hotel staff and improving the quality of service, of course :-)). Copyrights and permissions can be sorted out at a later stage before pubblication. If you do record you have an option to publish, if you don't you lose the opportunity. - if you then manage to make the recording available, I think it would be very good promotion for next year conference: people know well that most of the value of a conference is in being in the same place with presenters and other practicioners. On large corporations, yes they can be bitchy for no particular reason. I use to work for one. But in general things are sorted out, especially if nobody is making money out of it. As an example, I was at the Y Combinators startup school and all presentations were recorded by multiple people. The recordings were not made by the organization, but were placed on the organization's website. One large company that does no evil asked for their presentation (both audio and slides! to be removed), but other than that everything was published (and thanks to the power of the internetS, even the removed one is still kind of floating around elsewhere, which is knowledge that might be of use in Washington these days). At least publishing slides shouldn't be a problem at all, from a legal standpoint. Most conferences publish proceedings which for large conferences (say IEEE or ACM) are made available to the public. And when I was working for large corporations nobody has ever asked me whether the conference was large or small, or whether proceedings would have been made available. It was understood that if you present things to a conference open to public registration, you were willing to disclose the material publicly. Now slides are a bit different because they may contain material that you don't necessarily want to be printed and saved for posterity (typically half-baked attempts at humor), but tutorial-style slides are probably pretty aseptic and safe. In short, it would be terrific if you could make recording available. But I understand your position. Regards, Maurizio