Comments on: Ideas for screencasts & video introductions?

By: Benoit (:benwa)

Benoit (:benwa) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:59:57 +0000

@Dria – I had to wait for your follow up blog post to catch my attention again, apparently wordpress does not send email notifications on replies. I would love to do the screencast. I have created a blog post asking what topics people would like me to cover.

By: Learning Mozilla Syllabus « Benoit Girard's Blog

Learning Mozilla Syllabus « Benoit Girard's Blog — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 04:55:41 +0000

[...] a few times the idea of creating resources aimed specify at new members. Dria’s recent blog (1) posts (2) asking for screencasts and resources aimed at learning mozilla caught my [...]

By: Learning Mozilla resources? :: dria.org

Learning Mozilla resources? :: dria.org — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:39:46 +0000

[...] week, I asked for suggestions about possible screencast/video introductions we should produce to help people learn about Mozilla, our tools, our methods, and how to get [...]

By: Dan Mosedale

Dan Mosedale — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:42:11 +0000

I’m really excited about having organized, maintained collateral about how to get involved with and be effective in the Mozilla community, whatever the medium. Go Deb!

By: dria

dria — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:19:38 +0000

@Atul — awesome idea…I’ll try to figure out how we can better expose some of the content that we already have.

By: dria

dria — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:17:42 +0000

@Benoit — that’s a great suggestion. It would be fantastic if you could actually do the screencast since you have a fresh perspective on it and could probably do a better job than a lot of old veteran contributors. If there’s anything I can do to help you with it, let me know.

By: Benoit (:benwa)

Benoit (:benwa) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:07:27 +0000

As a new members to the community I found that there is a lot of well documented information to get new developers up to speed. The challenging part is putting the pieces together to understand how everything fits together. This is something that can feel fairly obvious to people that have been contributing for a long period of time but was something I struggled with during the first month. The current documentation is more in the format of a reference then a “read through” for beginners.

This leads me to my suggestion. I was considering making a screencast targeted at new community members. The screencast would show a brief overview of bugzilla, irc, building and providing the links to the existing articles for the advance topics. Perhaps even going over the simulated process of re solving a [good first bug] tagged bug and the review process.

I was planning on working on this once I got my work load under control but feel free to steal the idea.

By: Atul

Atul — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:53:51 +0000

A video introduction to IRC would be nice!

More importantly though, I think that these tutorials need to (somehow!) be really, really easy to find. Linking to Johnath’s video from the front page of bugzilla.mozilla.org, or possibly even embedding it right there, could help a lot of folks find it. Maybe even consider linking to it from the header or footer of every page.

Just yesterday Dan Mosedale introduced me to David Humphrey’s tutorials at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Education/Learning. I had no idea such awesome tutorials already existed!

In a lot of ways, screencasts on these things Humphrey has written about wouldn’t necessarily be better–more effective than a screencast, I’m guessing, would just be making more people aware of these tutorials, linking to them from touchpoints where people who don’t already know about them will encounter them.