1) Timestamped video
It’s a good idea to watch the video through before you start, to get a clear idea of what is covered. Make rough timestamps as you go, and then go back and adjust if you feel you need to give more, or less, detail at any point.
The aim of timestamping is to avoid someone having to watch lengthy chunks of video to find the information they want. So as a rough guide, add a new timestamp at least every 10-15 minutes.
For a structured meeting with an agenda, your timestamps should be the agenda items - but break down any long agenda items (more than 10 minutes’ discussion) further.
For a more discursive meeting with no set agenda, make a new timestamp whenever there is a new speaker, and/or whenever the same speaker changes subject or gives substantial new information. How “zoomed in” this is depends on the density/ complexity of the information, your likely audience’s level of knowledge, and whether you have additional documentation such as a summary or transcript.
For a Q&A-style meeting, the timestamps should be the actual questions - again, breaking down any long ones.
“More timestamps” is not necessarily “better”. Even for a very complex meeting, if you can’t afford to spend time on detailed timestamps, then high-level ones are much better then nothing. But note that in order to determine what the high-level timestamps should be, you’ll need a good understanding of what is being discussed; if you don’t have this, then check your work with someone who does.
Make the text at each timestamp as succinct, concrete, and information-dense as you can; avoid woolly narrative in favour of actual information. So not “1:15:30 Jo Soap discusses the project she is currently engaged in and gives a wonderful detailed breakdown about its aims and who it is working with”, but “1:15:30 Jo Soap: Cardano education project with ex-prisoners in Latvia”.
Usually, the text should state what was said, rather than describing it: so not "10:20 Jo Soap discusses her overall impressions of Catalyst", but "10:20 Jo Soap: Catalyst helped me deliver my project".
Above all, avoid mischaracterising or misrepresenting what a speaker says, or editorialising and giving your own opinion in your timestamp text.
If you’re new to the community, you can still timestamp; but you will likely need help identifying speakers’ names, so find someone who can check this for you.
NOTE: In Project Catalyst, and a couple of other global online communities, we have found that timestamping videos is the single most worthwhile thing you can do in terms of documentation.
So if you do nothing else - do this!
The majority of our information, in these communities, is in the form of videos - and videos (if they're longer than a couple of minutes) become very inaccessible if they are not timestamped, because people will not watch them through to uncover the information they want. Timestamps make them usable.
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