Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Plone Visual Training Project Idea

I'd like to see a Plone visual training series, released under a CC style license.

The idea is to have a series of 1 to 5 minute screencasts professionally produced. These screencasts would make up a complete "track/series" for example the "Plone Theming Series" or the "Plone Developer Fundamentals Series" or "Administering Plone".

How would it be funded?
We'd need to determine the real production cost and pay someone to develop the screencasts. The funding would come from donations from the community.

How would it be done?

  • Screencast sprints to develop script outlines
  • One or two individuals to "flesh out" the scripts and storyboards.
  • Professional implementation for the screencasts themselves
  • Voicing by professionals, possibly comissioned via voices.com or a similar service

Usually I sit on my ponderings for a much longer period. I try to refine them and then, when I think they are well formed, I articulate the near complete idea.

This time I think it is worth following the "release early, release often" approach.

We already have the medium for deploying the content in Plone.tv.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi David,

I've been thinking along the same lines, and have approached the board with this idea. Although we were thinking screencasts more for promotional purposes than for instructional purposes.

We also might want to consider using Amberjack to make the visual tutorials instead of video screencasts. See my lightning talk about it from the Plone Symposium.
http://www.slideshare.net/Jazkarta/amberjack-lightning-talk

Unknown said...

Btw, for more info about Amberjack visit http://amberjack.org and see the buildout in the collective.
http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.amberjack.buildout/trunk/

Unknown said...

@Nate,

I'll need to review Amberjack. To me, that would be an implementaion detail, though I like the idea of being able to publish screencasts at video sharing sites like vimeo and youtube.

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