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 ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.virginmedia.com/email Virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software and scanned for spam