Thank you arhag. I appreciate the input. I feel this way too, but at the same time it seems most people want to get us away from using delegate pay and become profitable on our own...so I'm doing very much what you are saying. Testing it.
Now with that said. ..the average LTB show takes over a week to get to the public from the recording date and we are shooting for, at most 48 hours. ..and if someone else attends, they can all record it too. Ultimately I want to see more of one thing: open participation.
It is unfortunate if people aren't willing to vote for a delegate to fund such an important function (IMHO) in our community as the Mumble hangouts. The costs aren't even that high (are they?). I am not talking about the cost of editing, creating transcripts, etc. I am only concerned about the cost of the infrastructure to allow people to run public hangout sessions, and the cost of recording those sessions and posting a raw recording (in MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format) on the internet for the people we weren't able to attend live. The cost of running a conversion from wav to mp3 or ogg is virtually nothing. The cost of upload and hosting is incredibly small these days. Mumble has functionality to record the wav file already in there. Anyone attending the hangout can do the recording, conversion, and uploading (they may just need a lesson on how to do it). The only significant cost is the cost of actually running the Mumble servers. How much do the servers cost? I doubt people aren't willing to fund delegates to pay for that (your 100% pay fuzzy.beyondbitcoin delegate is already elected after all).
Now all the other costs (your time as moderator, editing, etc.) are costs that can be covered through other means that you are attempting to develop (if the BTS community for some reason doesn't think it is worth covering those costs with delegate pay). But I don't think those costs should be paid for by attempting to hold the raw recording hostage. These are value added services on top of the raw recording. So the final edited audio is what you should be attempting to monetize (say through ads, or exclusive early access of the edited audio / convenient transcripts to UIA holders before it is eventually released to the public to maximize exposure to BitShares).
Its funny. I would ultimately love to see others setting up and running hangouts. I'd also like mumble to be a place where people coordinating local meetups could direct those who are interested in them but unable to physically attend.
The difficult thing, however is that not all holders of our bts want to spend the 15 seconds it would take to share the beautiful, organic gem we have here. People join to talk and listen, but sharing our community's gem is something that one would think would be an easy thing...yet for some reason it is not happening. This inaction hurts all of us.
In addition to this, we are currently working on making it easy for people providing services to schedule times to actually give lectures and recognize time (recorded) walk-throug to utilizing those services as I suspect this is a severely underestimated problem in the ecosystem.
I greatly appreciate proposed solutions as opposed to trolling because we really think that beyond bitcoin should be a platform that is more of a community hub that empowers and rewards everyone who actively partivipates. If there is a way to make this happen...I want to do my best to help it.