@members As part of our 2.022 efforts I’d like to launch a series of public webinars focused on popular topics communities we work with, or folks on meta, are often interested in. These would act as content marketing for us. We’d list them in a news section on our new website.
I’d love to have another member to work with in both developing the content and delivering the webinars. I’m thinkinng we host them here in the #community category which we’ll make public once we’re ready. Anyone interested in working with me on this?
These are some of the topics I have in mind:
What to consider when starting a new community
How to get started with Discourse theme development
How to get started with self hosting Discourse
Power user masterclass
Discourse moderation masterclass
What to consider when setting up a joint website and a community
What else?
We could also consider charging for them, e.g. something like $25 a head.
I guess something I classically noticed with webinars is they don’t tend to post vods/recordings publicly, I think mainly to entice people into paying/showing up?
Feel like maybe if we have webinars we should also have all the material we generate from them be public per our open source philosophy.
I think that the impact of free, public resources will be higher than trying to paywall them, and actually may result in increased ‘indirect’ revenue such as contracts for Pavilion in terms of hosting/consultancy/community development advice and similar.
Great, yes I think we can probably try all of these ideas at some point. I think starting out with some free public webinars might be a good place to start. Maybe @pacharanero and I can start on that. @Eli if you’re keen, you could also try recording some videos in tandem? No reason we can’t do both at once.
I mean the recorded videos should be the public seminars no? That’s standard in a few fields. Anyways, would personally rather work on recorded live webinars then fully pre-recorded ones. Lack of copy editing and stumbles are more forgivable in the former.
Okay so I’ve run a few of these before, in the past they were generally one-time affairs though (since recording available afterwards).
First step is an outline, then probably some sort of powerpoint. I think it’ fine for 3 of us to be doing them, maybe each talking about topics we’re the most familiar with.
Just as an initial “guess”
angus: intro, technical/dev, (gdpr/privacy stuff lolol??? we get asked about this a surprising amount).
marcus: Hosting/Support, Power users? (don’t think we should necessarily reccomend self-hosting btw, convinced most people should just be on a cheap hosted plan).
me: Strategic thoughts, moderation.
Also in terms of length, I think 60 minutes WITH the q and a is ideal but can research that again, so need to keep that in mind for topic split.
3 separate categories? Are you imagining separate webinars? I’m imagining one that offers some cohesive story. Like
“getting your community up and running the way you want it on a budget”
then we can:
Cheapest is self-hosting - here’s how!
Content and category organization and understanding users is important! Here’s how to do it!
There’s a lot of free open source stuff, here’s some popular things to mess around with!
How to get started on dev work if you want to do it yourself!
And then offer “alternatives” that cost money (self hosting too much work and you have some money? can hire one of these guys. Can’t figure out a strategy that works? Fill out this form. Can’t figure out how to get some feature you want put together? Fill out this form to see if we’re a good fit.)
Interesting, yeah, I think there’s a place for a cohesive story, but I think we’re going to be catering to more than one market. Someone interested in theme development might not be setting up their own discourse and vice-versa.
I think the “cohesive story” might come in your course, as it’s targeted at the kind of person who wants that?
What I’m saying is I think we should start by delivering 1 good webinar with a clear audience, whatever that is rather than like my course or your course etc.
Makes more sense to work together on making one good one than each doing our own. I’d rather get this done as a group endeavor and to do that I think we should focus on one market first, we can decide on what that is together.
One idea is to be a bit selfish and choose the one that would also drive up our sales the most.
