Contribute to live subtitles

This year we want to do live subtitles for as many talks as possible. For this we need your help.

Doing live subtitles is a non-trivial task, which requires good focus and endurance. As we do not really have access to expensive equipment and professional captioners, we rely on your commitment with keyboard and teamwork.

You should be able to type quickly – 400 characters per minute or more than 80 words per minute would be awesome http://10fastfingers.com/typing-test/. Still accurate typing is appreciated and might be more useful in many cases than raw speed. Also important: be able to look on your screen while typing. Creating subtitles with our system is teamwork and therefore you need to be able to react to visual feedback within the subtitling system, which wouldn't work, if you are looking on your fingers while typing!

As you are reading this in English it makes you even more desired! As most of the talks will be in English, but most of us are non-native speaker, we hope to improve a lot the English talks by providing subtitles, with your help.

It's very important for us to support you – as a subtitles angel – as much as possible; part of it involves regular meetups and introductions.

Of course you won't be alone! In every hall always a team of two to four people will be typing. Also, you will always have a subtitles angel coordinator responsible for the hall, that will be there to manage the various issues that might arise. Seats reserved for subtitle angels have power and LAN, so access to the transcription interface should be ensured.

According to past experience, the people you work well with (or not!) are a very individual thing. So it would be great if you try to form teams together with those people ;)

Don't worry about mistakes! Even though we were criticized in the past for “unconvincing” subtitle quality by some parts of the audience, subtitles that are not absolutely perfect are still highly helpful for deaf or hearing-impaired people, along with non-native speakers, especially when the alternative is no subtitles at all. So be bold, come to our meetups and have a try!

We are happy if you decide to join us!

To become subtitles angel, follow these steps:

1. Sign up to the Engelsystem and choose the “Subtitle Angel” role.
2. Get a phone connection. Best case via Eventphone system.
3. Add your contact information to the Engelsystem. A phone number on congress is important! If you don't have DECT/Eventphone-GSM, add at least your german cell phone number.
4. The “Subtitles Angel” role is restricted. We will unlock you, as soon as you came to an introduction.
5. If we get it done, we will setup a test environment for our live subtitles interface, where you can make yourself familiar with it
6. Bring with you: your laptop with LAN socket, power supply and DECT phone. If you use an external keyboard, please do not use a loud and clickery one.
7. Very important: come to an introduction meetup, as soon as you arrived. Time and location will be provided in advance and we will setup introductions as often as needed. As soon as we have rooms for that, we will also have a subtitles home base for you. For the 36c3 you can find the introduction meeting announcements here: 36c3 Wiki Subtitles-Angelmeetings

- For more questions go directly to #subtitles or contact us. Also it is certainly a good idea, to follow our account on Twitter @c3subtitles.

1. And if you're keen on doing something, create some subtitles for recordings from last year.
2. Have a look on our style guide for some best practices!

contact us!