As the Foreman Community Demos moderator and as an active member of this community, I wanted to share some suggestions to improve our demo sessions further. These ideas aim to enhance the overall experience for both presenters and attendees, ensuring that we effectively showcase the power and versatility of Foreman.
Add a co-host to moderate the demo:
I propose inviting a co-host to assist in moderating the demo sessions. Collaborating with a co-host can help distribute the responsibilities of managing the session, ensuring a smooth flow and engaging experience for all participants. The co-host can take on tasks such as monitoring the chat or Q&A, assisting with technical issues, introducing speakers or topics, and facilitating discussions.
If you are interested in contributing as a co-host and would like to help shape the future of our demo sessions, please consider volunteering your time and expertise.
Start by showing examples of popular use cases:
When there is available time, I recommend initiating the session by presenting popular use cases of Foreman. These use cases should focus on illustrating common scenarios and workflows that the community frequently encounters or finds valuable. By showcasing how Foreman can effectively tackle specific challenges, automate tasks, and streamline processes, we can offer attendees practical examples, real-world scenarios, and best practices.
We welcome your suggestions for topics to present during these demos. If you have any specific use cases or features that you would like to see in action, please share your ideas with us. Furthermore, if you are knowledgeable in a particular area of Foreman and would like to volunteer to demonstrate a topic during our demo sessions, we encourage you to step forward.
Creating a guidance document for presenters:
To ensure that our demo presentations are effective and engaging, I started working on a document with guidance for presenters. This document would serve as a valuable resource, offering a step-by-step framework to captivate the audience, focusing on engaging QA testers who play a vital role in evaluating and validating our work. By following the guidelines presented in this document, presenters will be able to provide valuable context, demonstrate features effectively, address potential challenges, and foster meaningful interaction with the community.
These suggestions aim to elevate the Foreman Community Demo experience, making it more interactive, informative, and engaging. By implementing these improvements, we can further strengthen our community bonds and showcase the true potential of Foreman.
I would love to hear your thoughts on these suggestions and welcome any additional ideas you may have. Let’s work together to enhance our Foreman Community Demo sessions and continue to drive innovation within our community.
Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to our continued collaboration!
Nofar, let me start by saying this is a great effort.
I volunteer to demo some use cases. Do you already have some topics in mind? Few that comes to my mind:
adding hosts to the Foreman inventory (registration and other means, perhaps each can be separate)
various kinds of provisioning (baremetal, discovery, bootdisks, compute resources, image based provisioning), customizing provisioning templates through parameters and template editor
compliance enforcement through openscap integration
running custom script/task on hosts
tweaking Foreman behavior through settings
configuration of hosts through ansible roles
configuration of hosts through puppet modules
investigating infrastructure through dashboard capabilities
managing Foreman templates in external git repository
searching through out the inventory
mirroring some repository and maintaining a local copy
versioning of the content
It may be good to have some structure, this was just a quick brainstorming.
Also there’s probably many more. I think such recordings will reveal the what is possible to do with Foreman to users but also will help the developers to better understand more use cases from other parts of the ecosystem.
Did you already find some co-host? And if so, would it make sense to have more than one in case one of you is unavailable?
The guidance document is a good list of things to consider and focus on during the demos. Thanks for putting it together. Do you have some thoughts on where to have this information stored so people can link to it and potentially update it in future easily?
Hi Marek, first of all, thank you for volunteering to demo use cases with Foreman. Your help is much appreciated! Here are some responses and suggestions regarding your post:
Topics and Use Cases: The topics you mentioned are excellent and cover a wide range of functionalities in Foreman. They would indeed make great use cases for demonstrating the capabilities of the platform.
Structure and Organization: Having a structured approach is a fantastic idea. It would provide clarity and make it easier for users and developers to navigate the information. Your brainstorming list already offers a good starting point, and we can further refine it into a logical order or categorize it based on functionality or complexity. To enhance the demos, I suggest starting each session by explaining the significance of the featured use case and how it addresses specific user needs or challenges. This context will help the audience understand the practical value of the demonstrated functionality.
Co-hosts: Currently, we have one volunteer, but having multiple co-hosts would bring additional benefits. It would provide continuity in case one person becomes unavailable and allows for a broader range of perspectives and expertise during the demos. Multiple co-hosts can create a more dynamic and engaging presentation, encouraging active participation from the audience.
Storage and Accessibility: We can explore a few options for storing and accessing the guidance document. We can consider leaving it as a Google Doc, adding it to our GitHub repository here, or opening a post in the community and categorizing it under the tutorials section. These options will provide different levels of accessibility and allow for potential updates in the future. Let’s discuss further to determine the best approach.
Thank you once again for your valuable involvement and suggestions.
+1 for this, it could bring some new users and show some interesting functionality to existing users. Two things to consider:
First, it should be easy to follow, just a few minutes with a simple structure:
Description of a use case or the problem that can be solved by the Foreman
Demo
Mentioning further capabilities
The end
Second thing, I think it should live outside of the demo sessions, having a dedicated playlist on the YT channel.
Creating a guidance document for presenters:
+1 Awesome
One thing that could be useful for our viewers is that we could start with transcripts and subtitles in our videos. Not all of our users (and community members) are native speakers so this could also help. Personally I love videos where I have the option to enable subs, it’s just easier for me to follow.
Thank you, Leos, for your valuable suggestions! I appreciate your input, and I will certainly implement all of them.
I am currently in the process of finalizing the specifics for presenting popular use cases of Foreman. After considering your and Marek’s feedback, I think that it would be best to give it a separate dedicated post.
For the videos with use cases, I absolutely love the YT channel fireship.io, they have short and easy to follow videos about various topics in programming, web, and IT in general.
The videos are short, fast-paced and deliver the message about the topic without unnecessary details that I don’t need. If I need more details I can go to docs or here. If we would have such videos that would be great.
It is perhaps an extra step to extract them from the community demo, but may worth it. Then create an additional playlist for it so they can easier be found. Could be useful to target a different audience.
