Hi, I wanted to provide some initial reveiw on the Tomcat Webinar series I started last week.
Attendance for the live webinars was low with only a couple of people attending the first (EU timezones) session and 5-10 attending the second (US timezones). The technology worked fairly well. Initially, I went with the default settings which enabled attendee video. As a presenter this was rather distracting since the UI reconfigures every time an attendee turns video on/off. For the second presentation I went through and removed all the features we don't need which should be less distracting for attendees and presenters. Recording is simple although conversion to mp4 is a little on the slow side - not much better than real time. Uploading to YouTube is simple although there are some small delays while the video is processed. Editing (trimming start and end) was also simple and performed on YouTube. I looked at doing the editing locally but the OS provided tools weren't great and significantly increased the file size. Probably mostly user error but the YouTube UI was much easier to get to grips with. We have had 175 views since the Webinar was uploaded with an average viewing time of ~10 minutes. The whole presentation is ~30 mins. 35% of views stopped after 20s. 45% had stopped after 60s. We then lost just over 1% a minute until the end where there were 20% left. PMC members have access to the YouTube account where they are free to explore the stats for themselves. As we add more videos, the stats should become more meaningful. Overall, the live attendance was lower than I hoped but it is early days. I have scheduled another couple of Webinars and I plan to see how the stats unfold. I'm currently aiming for one every two weeks. If anyone would like to volunteer for the Jan 19th slot, do speak up. I'll manage the webinar technology side of things, you just need to give the presentation. It will be interesting to see what impact this has on ApacheCon. Given the total number of Tomcat users, neither ApacheCon nor the Webinars are (currently) reaching a significant proportion of them. My hope is that the Webinars will encourage people to attend ApacheCon but we shall have to see. Alongside the Webinars, I have been using our Twitter account much more frequently. Activity around this seems to be picking up slowly as well. When our next board report rolls around, we should probably include some variation of the above. Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@tomcat.apache.org
