FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Haiku Presenticasts

[Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi yet again,

Final email of the morning from me, I promise.

It would be nice to have new developers for Haiku. Most people's first port of 
call to learn more information is the Haiku website. We should provide new 
content to ease the process of them learning about Haiku and beginning to 
contribute.

Presentations are a good way of communicating key points to people quickly. 
Many people are more comfortable learning by watching a presentation than by 
reading text. So let's put some presentations on the website.

There already are some videos of talks on the website - the Google Tech Talk, 
mmu_man's Numerica talk, and some links to other Haiku videos. What's wrong 
with them? Firstly the videos are just recordings of people giving talks. The 
web audience feels like they missed out by not being there in person. Secondly 
they're too long - they're perfect for conference venues when people have made 
a journey or an effort to see a presentation and want to get their money's 
worth - but they're too long for a web audience. Thirdly they're irregular and 
cover a lot of the same material - videos of general Haiku talks are always 
going to cover the introductory stuff first. I admit I gave up on the Numerica 
one after downloading the first bit as I thought I would probably know all of 
the stuff being presented. If there was some interesting content later in the 
presentation, I missed it.

So here's the proposal. Let's produce a series of presentations directly for 
the web audience.
1. List all the presentations in a prominent place on the Haiku website.
2. Each presentation has its own page containing the video (perhaps one of the 
embedded controls from a video hosting provider), a space for questions arising 
which the presenter can answer, download links for the slides used in case 
anyone would like to give the presentation to a live audience (perhaps at a 
Linux User Group meeting or something), and other related downloads such as 
source code used.
3. The presentations would be short and focussed - perhaps aiming for 10 
minutes is sensible although certain subjects could see this extended.
4. New content could be released frequently and people could subscribe to 
updates. This is where my name "Presenticasts" comes from (bit like podcasts, 
but for presentations - geddit?)
5. This regular content model means "series" are possible which helps to fit in 
with the short 10 minute format. For example the "Hello World - My First BeOS 
Application" series could be split into multiple parts released week-by-week. 
Once the series is complete obviously all the parts are available for watching 
one after the other on the website if people want an intensive course. I think 
this approach will make more people stick with the series and prevent them 
being put off by clicking on a link and seeing the time bar be hours long. The 
other advantage of regular content is that it helps the project appear active 
and gives people a reason to stay in touch with the project as it progresses 
towards a release.

Jorge has raised the point that people are unlikely to take the time and effort 
to produce presentations without an event like WC to make them for. I agree 
initially that may be a problem. However if the idea is successful and there 
are 100s or even 1000s of subscribers then I hope the size of the audience will 
convince some of the core devs to contribute some presentations about their own 
area of expertise. Personally I would rather spend time and effort on a short 
presentation I knew would be seen by hundreds of people who specifically chose 
to watch it than to produce a presentation for an audience of 10-30 at a 
conference, many of whom would not really be very interested in the content.

In order to get the ball rolling on this, I'm planning to attempt to produce a 
few of these in order to get some feedback. Some stuff I would potentially be 
able to produce:

"Why Haiku: A Personal Perspective"
"What is Haiku - History, Goals, Future"
"Getting Started With Haiku using BeOS R5"
 --"Part 1: Setting Up BeOS R5"
 --"Part 2: Installing the Prerequisites"
 --"Part 3: Getting and Building the Tree"
 --"Part 4: Booting Haiku"
"Development Under BeOS"
 --"Part 1: Introducing BeIDE"
 --"Part 2: Introducing the Bebook and the BeAPI"
 --"Part 3: HelloWorld Part 1 - Your First BWindow"
 --"Part 4: HelloWorld Part 2 - BViews"
Potentially others...

Thoughts/comments/suggestions?

Simon

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