About "Waasabi", the RustFest streaming experience

Please note we are still working hard on the streaming experience and will post more information below as it becomes more readily available! In the meanwhile, if you have any specific questions or requests, feel free to drop us an email at info@rustfest.global

For RustFest Global we will be using our very own web-based streaming experience. The software powering the streaming experience (called "Waasabi", after the Estonian word "kaasabi" (="together")) is still under heavy development and will be published as open source after the event so many more communities can also benefit from using it!

The primary goals of Waasabi is to provide us with a framework that allows for experimentation, customization and lets us better cater for a global audience and simply to the different expectations and ways of how people consume online events.

The flexibility this tool affords us also helps us explore new business models for this event. RustFest is a community-organized, non-profit event but this doesn't mean it's without costs and we have been working to ensure its long-time sustainability since the very first RustFest, Waasabi will help us in this as well.

Accessibility #

The team spends a great amount of effort on making RustFest globally inclusive and accessible — and this is no less true for the online experience. We do our best to make the interface keyboard-accessible, high contrast, we have live captions for all talks and constantly working to ensure that everyone who is interested can watch and participate in the event. If you still have concerns, or recommendations, feel free to reach out to the team at team@rustfest.global.

Replays #

RustFest provides instant replays for all talks and sessions within the streaming experience. This means that whenever a presentation ends it is instantly transcoded and is available for "on-demand" viewing. Many of our talks happen live and we have a live Q&A with questions from the audience, but if for whatever reason you miss a presentation there's no need to wait weeks until they are published.

We see this as a crucial affordance for online events, and especially so for something like RustFest global, an event that spans almost an entire day. This feature is only available to people who are logged in with an access pass (~purchased or received a ticket).

Please note that all talks are still published on the RustFest YouTube channel in full quality, eventually. We plan to start releasing the sessions in December. Anyone with an access pass (even if it was purchased during, or even after the live event!) can watch all the talks, anytime.

Free public stream #

RustFest provides a free, lower resolution public live stream for the entire conference because we believe it helps our community. This is not only about affordability of tickets, it also acknowledges that we engage with online events very differently than in-person ones. Want to have the RustFest stream popped out into a second monitor or a small corner of your display while you work? You can do that! Did you see a talk that was interesting and wanted to watch it in its full glory? Maybe missed an interesting part because of the dog, or the delievery person? You can make a note and come back to it once it's published, or pay for an access pass and watch right away. We want to enable the largest amount of people getting the most value out of our event, and sometimes that means providing content gratis.

So why not make the conference completely free? First of all, we have had really generous sponsors who has covered a big chunk of RustFest's costs. That said, no amount of money can be too much to spend on making the conference better (this is not just something we say, we have the numbers to back it up!), and so we want to encourage people who have the means to support the conference. But we understand this is a tricky trade-off to walk, and we are happy to experiment in different ways to make it happen!

Differences between public and paid streams #

Here are the main differences between the free public stream and the paid (access pass) experience for RustFest Global: