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Kickoff event

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Goals for kickoff event

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Our immediate task (mainly at an in-person event Sept. 25 to 27) is to produce about seven screencasts on "how to produce a screencast about Wikipedia." We should also assemble them on a wiki page that ties them all together; ideally, time permitting, we should produce several examples of the sort of screencasts people could produce, as well.

Here's one way we could approach it:

Explain and visualize the different steps required to make a screencast:

  • Planning a screencast
  • Tools needed
  • Recording a screencast
  • Recording and adding audio
  • Encoding the video to other formats
  • Making the video available to others
Agenda

Agenda

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Saturday, September 25

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  • 9am–noon: Session I
    • Introductions
    • Discussion of project, goals
    • 10:30am coffee break
    • Timelines
    • Outputs
    • Show sample screencasts, discuss what they do well
  • 1pm–5pm: Session II
    • Work assignments
    • Group assignments
    • Workspaces
    • Review/assess and plan for Sunday

Sunday, September 26

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  • 9am–noon: Session I
    • Review of Saturday
    • Work
  • Session II
    • Identification of obstacles, sharing of success stories
    • Work
    • Review/assess and plan for Monday

Monday, September 27

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  • 9am–11am: Session I
    • Review of work
    • Determine which screencasts are presentation-ready
    • Quick review of personnel
  • 11am staff social time
  • Session II (ends at 2pm)
    • Feedback from staff
    • Work
    • Announce and recruit, next steps
    • Goodbye

Notes from Kickoff

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Housekeeping

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Notes

  • This page

Communication

  • IRC Channel
#wikimedia-outreach (http://webchat.freenode.net)

Mandate

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  • "Come out of the event with seven screencasts about creating screencasts."
  • Make the end-product applicable to/useful for most mediawiki projects--at least where it doesn't get in the way of helping wikipedia users.
  • Platform neutral, ideally open-source software

Deliverables

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Screencast project Create a framework of resources for creating public outreach materials on the English language Wikipedia for volunteers and to serve as a model for other language versions. Online tutorial and resources webpages
Step-by-step screencasting “how-to” series Explain and visualize the different steps required to make a screencast. 7 Videos, 2–3 min./each
2-3 example videos Explain some features of Wikipedia: how to create user account, etc. 2-3 videos

Possible topics

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Note: These are further developed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Screencast/Scripts
0. Planning - Preproduction - Upload - Extras
  1. Introduction
    Script 1: What is a screencast? What are the ideals of the project?
  2. Planning a screencast
    Script 2: Establishing a purpose / audience, Writing a script
    Script 3: Assembling material
  3. Tools needed (Tied to page about different platforms)
    Script 4: Possible hardware and software
  4. Pre-production
    Script 5: Physical environment, testing equipment, simplifying
  5. Production
    Script 6: Overview
    Script 7: Sort-of-advanced
  6. Post-production
    Script 8: Encoding and testing
    Script 9: Uploading and placement
  7. Advanced
    Script 10: Know-it-all uber expert super fancy fun time has

Audience

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  1. New users (more likely to be interested in screencasts about using Wikipedia)
  2. Experienced users (more likely to be interested in screencasts about making screencasts)


Issue

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One basic issue is whether to do different versions for learning styles/audiences or different topics.

A proposed solution create a matrix of the two axes (audiences and topics) and find the points on that matrix we want to hit.

Dimensions of audience matrix

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  • Novice nerds vs. experienced nerds
  • Live screencasters vs. Edited screencasters
  • Slidecasters vs. screencasters
  • Visual learners vs. text learners vs. auditory learners
  • Computer vs. mobile

Feedback from Samples

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From Yahoo! Pipes tutorial demo'ed:

  • background noise
  • editing software not needed
  • tech how-to

Video on WP about Sandboxes

  • over-produced
  • Edited
  • general overview

Pointers

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Simplify

  • Make sure your screen looks like what the user's will look like
    Create a new account!
    Unclutter and remove irrelevancies
  • Preserve scripts and components to allow further editing
  • Avoid numbering to facilitate addition/subtraction of elements
  • "Visual template" to make videos similar

Team Breakouts, Day 1

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Notes from production

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Notes from Viewing

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Team Mobile

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Why mobile?

mobile screencasts...

  • allow people without PC's to learn from each other
  • rely more on creativity and can be more fun
  • use very simple tools people know well: cellphone and mobile camera
  • can be done anywhere, anytime, and promote social interaction
  • will make you feel like you're stanley kubrick
  • can also be valuable for pc users if mobile device has a full featured web browser
  • are important because mobile clients often have particular interfaces, thus mobile users do not benefit from regular screencasts
  • during the WMF Strategic Planning, mobile was identified both as a priority in itself and as an important element for growth in priority regions
Notes on 1st day execution
  • Four videos, two of which were "demonstrated"
    • Videos uploaded to YouTube as that is one of the easiests ways to share on the mobile platform.
  • Very informal, "guerilla" format.
    • Hard to do formal and polished given the limits of the technology being employed.
    • Given who would make these videos and where they would be made, this sort of format feels appropiate as mobile devices are more informal and on the go. You wouldn't do serious wiki editing on a mobile unless you were limited to a mobile anyway. Even then, it would be difficult.
    • Less formal probably works better for an audience that is worried more about access and understanding of WMF projects.
  • There are limits to some mobile phone recording devices.
    • You need to do things on one take as you cannot pause and restart.
    • You need to literally shoot the screen so there are glare issues.
    • You need to literally shoot the screen so there are issues with focus: Need to get close enough to make things big enough. Need to stay far enough away to make things stay in focus. This doesn't always work.
    • You don't get a pointer. Rather you need to use your finger or a stylus to show on screen action.
  • Script issues.
    • Script needs to be more polished.
      • Hard to read a script as no place to show it without fear it will show on camera if you are using the mobile.
      • Desire to deviate from script to better explain what you're doing.
        • Accidental swearing, vulgarity, odd pauses and strange word selections with no way to fix with out refilming.
    • Script needs to be written down on paper. It isn't really possible to read from an on mobile device while screencasting as the screen is needed to display other things.
    • General script framework needed for beginning.
    • If copy of text is needed, it may be better to get a transcript after the fact.
      • Two mobile devices are needed for transcription: One to watch and one to put the transcription.
  • Audio is an issue.
    • It looks better if you show a person and then get in closer to them to show on screen action. This is a problem as you need to rely on mobile phone microphone from a distance. This is inferior to using a headset as it can be harder to hear.
  • Videos are quick to make as you can do on one take. Makes it feel like they are less serious when you are making.
  • Planning is actually needed so that appropiate windows are open or can be switched to.
  • Different mobile devices will display differently so hard to make universal usage suggestions for how to handle the technical editing aspects.
  • Editing on a mobile device is difficult as mobile versions generally do not have an editing option.
    • Because the actual editing issues are the same in terms of content and format, the issue becomes more how to access editing in mobile mode, how to display WikiMedia Foundation wikis in mobile mode, various apps that are available, etc. These access issues are unique to the mobile platform given that application issue.
Team Mobile: Examples
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The following are some example videos made by this team on September 25, 2010:

These videos need to be edited to say that they have a creative commons license. They also need to be copied from YouTube to ogg format and uploaded on Commons.

Team Robert

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  • Tools:
    • Jing to create
    • Snap Z to record Jing
    • Quicktime to record the audio
    • iMovie for editing
    • and a couple of other programs (textedit and quark for text, photobooth, etc)
  • Took script, matched graphics, then recorded audio and used iMovie to match the video timing to the audio.
  • Feedback
    • A little busy
    • Needed more pauses (marking what would be paragraphs in text)

Team 1

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  • Took Pete's script, edited it, added graphics and talked over it.
  • Collaborative with great division of labour
  • Positive response to pacing and transitions...
  • ... but in one or two places, the transitions were slow.
  • Used Powerpoint and Paint for visuals, recorded with Screencast-o-matic

Team CamStudio

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CamStudio tutorial


Did several videos; one for how to perform a simple task. and one for how to use a screencasting software. and so on

Used CamStudio, FireFogg, and Pixetell

The main issue right now is how to guarantee than .ogv and .ogg file uploaded to commons actually play correctly.

Team Sequencer

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  • Used Kaltura/WMF "Sequencer" tool which is in beta
  • Learned that it is very much in beta
  • It's supposed to work by uploading graphics and video to Commons, and then recording a voice-over.
  • Once it gets out of beta, it is designed from the ground up to function in a way that matches the collaborative paradigm of Wikimedia projects, with a modular design that enables additional editors to do remixes and mash-ups modifying the original screencast.

Team Aude/Nihiltres/John

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Software used:

  • Audacity to record audio segments
  • XvidScreenCap (sp?) for a screencast segment
  • Safari to grab simple images
  • Downloaded a screencast from Vimeo
  • iMovie to bring it all together and to generate the text segments

Notes:

  • We made it very atomic; recorded the audio for each segment using Audacity
    Each resource remains in a folder with the final video
  • Atomicity of resources made the final generation very easy to do collaboratively.
    It would be possible for different people to edit the video and to generate the audio segments.
  • People can separately generate a script, generate audio clips corresponding to the script, and pull together the final video

Learning From Demos

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  • Would be a good idea to say you will need four skill sets (or however many) and think about whether one person can do it, or you need partners.

Four subject domains

  1. Technical
    • Presentation tools
    • Video/screencast capturing tools
    • Recording
  2. Subject Matter Expertise for Wiki stuff
  3. Educational/Instructional part of it
  4. polish in terms of film skills (meaning video, voice, etc.)

We need to consider both open source tools and open source content as being preferred.

We need to tell folks that OGG is problematic and how to get the video there.

Infrastructure for the WikiProject

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Put ideas in here that aren't necessarily relevant in the short term but that would be helpful for the long-term success of the WikiProject. Yes, dump it here and we can sort it out later after getting the main project out of the way. :)

Brainstorming notes

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Following content imported from Wikipedia:WikiProject Screencast/Brainstorming

Target audience

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Screencasts, of course, can be oriented at any number of target audiences. For this initial event, we will aim to produce a cohesive series.

The series we're producing in the Kickoff event is targeted at experienced Wikipedians who want to use screencasts to make instructional materials for new content contributors.

Other screencasts will have different audiences, but of particular interest are Wikipedians during their first 100 edits.

Who are we talking to in this screencast?

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What assumptions do we have about our audience's:

  • skills
  • available tools (software, hardware)
  • experience

How can we best reach them?

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Establish conventions for this screencast series (to reach this target audience):

  • What is our "manual of style"?

Each video should have some common elements. Here's a sample of how we could approach this:

  • Wikimedia Title
  • Title of Piece: "How to Boil Pasta"
  • Created by: Robert Deutsch
  • Date: July 2010
  • Screencast:
  • End: Creative Commons license language
  • Link: How to update/remix this piece (WikiProject Screencast)

Examples

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Some useful instructional screencasts -- need not be from the Wikimedia world.

Brainstorming notes

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WikiProject Screencast guidelines

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General suggestions for how to approach your screencast:

  • Consider your audience. Know who you are trying to reach, and how you will customize your approach to reach them. A screencast designed to teach an intermediate Wikipedian an advanced trick and one that introduces a basic software feature to a Wikipedia reader will take very different approaches.
  • Design for collaboration.
    • Language. Use clear language, with minimal slang or jargon, so that non-native speakers can understand. Pause between concepts, so that a future screencaster can record a different language audio track without running out of time. Leave some space at the bottom of the video to allow room for subtitles. Upload the text of your script, maybe with time stamps.
    • Updating. Will an update to the MediaWiki software or skin, or a change in policy, affect the relevance of your screencast? Leave enough component files behind for others to keep your work up to date if you become busy, or if they discover omissions.
    • Project adaptation: Consider whether a Wikisource or WikiNews editor want to adapt your work to their project.
  • Have fun! Enjoy yourself! Your passion for sharing free knowledge is your greatest asset in reaching your audience. If the viewer can tell you are having fun, they will be that much more likely to try out what you're demonstrating to them.

Specifics

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  1. Introduction of speaker
  2. Introduction of core concept and its greater meaning to Wikipedia/editors
  3. What you'll need to/before you get started (if applicable)
  4. Description of core concept
  5. Explanation of common mistakes (and how to correct them)
  6. Display of completed task
  7. Sign off and link to next task or URL

Scripts/transcripts

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These are important for ease of later translation, ease of video annotating, ease of initial proofreading, and provide the option of closed-captioning or giving the transcript beside the video (e.g. See this Howcast video).

Agree on the template or model

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Discuss Script + Film vs. Shoot + Edit

Thinking about to make videos that have the ability to be edited (in keeping with the Wikipedia concept), it might make sense to have the steps elucidated as First, Next, Next, Then and Last, rather than the use of primary, secondary, or some counting mechanism that could look awkward should a step be edited out.

Another thing the template should include are (very) brief moments of black or space. This will be helpful if the video needs to have a step added in or edited out in the future.

Get into groups and start working

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Reviewing each other's work, publishing

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If we are in separate groups, each group upon finishing a rough cut should show it to the other team for feedback.

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We will encounter several areas relating to intellectual property law (copyright, trademark). I (Pete) will try to get some guidance on this before the event, and maybe write up some guidelines. Here are some questions:

  • How can we approach taking screen captures that minimizes commercial software and copyright-protected text or images?
  • In cases where this cannot be avoided, how does fair use apply?
  • In cases where we're relying on the fair use principle, are there any Wikimedia sites where policies permit its use? (e.g., Outreach wiki)
  • How to approach mixing licenses - for instance, screencasts that involve GPL-licensed software, CC-BY-SA text, etc.?
  • Specific questions: the dolls and the "1000 words" ad from 1927, in this script: Wikipedia:WikiProject Screencast/Intro

Technical wish list

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  • A nice process to support proposing/scripting/editing/reviewing screencasts (for instance, I'm writing a script here)
  • A built-in feature on Wikipedia that makes it easy to take and upload a screen shot (especially for use with the Commons Sequencer)
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