It appears we have a lot of demos on the channel, that’s good but can we do better? Are there any ideas for good content? I think a good start would be to record a video content asking users to reply in comments what they would like to see. Any better idea? CC @mcorr
I can offer help with this, I do have software, hardware and know how on video editing so we could go beyond just video conferencing or screen recording. But youtube itself can do pretty good job in basic editing too.
to everyone who contributed a video over the past few years.
Creating videos is a time consuming task, but the majority of people would rather watch a video demo of what they’re trying to achieve than read through docs, so I think video creation is a worthy effort. Even videos that lack the shine of a marketing executive can be extremely useful for community members to get to grips with new concepts. I am forever in debt to those who took the time to record and upload their efforts to YouTube.
This also reminds me of the debates that occurred here in the community such as RFC: Make Foreman easy to deploy and maintain - #17 by viwon and Lot of critisism on reddit.com - #68 by John_Mitsch - there are similar themes that run through both of these discussions, both revolve around how to make Foreman easier to deploy and maintain. A short-term, non-technical solution to some of these problems would be to create video walk-throughs of key scenarios. If these videos exist already, we need to find a way to make them a more prominent part of the Getting Started experience on the site.
Another idea that I was thinking of was the findability of the content that we demo in community demos. For example, when I look at the channel now I see: Foreman Community Demo - #76 etc, but if I am looking for a video demo of the new External IPAM feature that I might want to use, I have to read more and dig deeper to find that - which I might not have the sense to do. One idea would be to host both the Community Demos and also to split the demos into unique videos hosted with a better name that users might find. Do you think that might be worth doing?
That reminds me, I remember this thread Deep Dive on Host Creation/Provisioning? - #8 by Walden - did anything ever happen with this? If a deep-dive doesn’t exist, either as a series of videos (probably more manageable and less-time consuming) that we could add to a playlist, or a longer, more traditional deep dive into this area would be extremely valuable. Would a more modular approach to a deep dive help community members contribute in a limited amount of time?
To answer your question: I think it would be a good idea to record a video like this, perhaps with an overview of the core components, and then asking for users to comment on what they’d like to see. It might be a nice addition to the newletter to mark 1000+ subscribers. I’m wondering if we could also go a step further where we could have user problems solved in videos if there are themes in the requests for help in the community.
+1000 I got this feedback from users and mentioned it to a few people. Anything that helps the findability and describes what is in the video better. More specific video titles and timestamps in the description would be a good place to start, it would at least help with users searching for specific things. Highlight videos would be good too if someone can do that. Even as a dev I like to find a video where something was demoed and it is impossible because the titles are all “Foreman community demo - #123”
And overall +1 to more walkthroughs and demos, it seems the community finds this very useful and that is how a lot of technical information is communicated these days. I think its hard to explain everything in documentation and a video makes this much easier. We should make time for this and enhance the channel.
I totally agree. I quite often search for specific feature and I need to go through all demos, sometimes they are not even tagged, which adds to the pain.
I think it would be wonderful if we build some basic use case videos and refresh this part with Foreman 2.0. Perhaps we could use stories we’re building for some Satellite training lab or perhaps @Dirk has some materials from their trainings we could record.
Feel free to use the training material at https://github.com/NETWAYS/foreman-training, with some adjustments most sections would also work like a youtube video explaining things and trying everything at home afterwards or you could even tell the audience to pause for an exercise before explaining the solution.
I am working on an update for 2.0 in between all the others things while stuck at home office. I would also volunteer for a session but I am quite busy at the moment (while others are complaining about to much free time, I have the luxus to complain about to much work).
I think that 2.0 release is a great opportunity. I think we could start with deployment plan and installation.
If this can’t be done easily in YouTube directly, I volunteer to do the work in my video editing software, I’d need to recode the videos tho. I could however apply audio filters and normalize / enhance audio a bit.
