Talk:CREDIT showcase

Uploading slides to Commons
Now that the Lightning Talks have been merged with this, I have added some presenter advice from Lightning_Talks, including a reminder for those who use slides to publish them on Commons (matching the general practice from say the monthly metrics meetings and the quarterly reviews), so that e.g. we can reuse them on the wikis (example). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Some learning
Here were some things learned from the CREDIT Showcase, which evolved from an original smaller Mobile Showcase.


 * Originally, there was a Mobile Showcase targeted at the then-named Mobile department. We started posting demos from this online. Participation was relatively steady.
 * After Mobile essentially became two different groups, Discovery and Reading, these two different groups were doing their own demos. Reading posted its videos. Eventually Discovery and Reading started posting their video together. Shortly thereafter, there was encouragement to further merge the effort across the technical organizations (Technology and Product), and it became CREDIT.
 * At first there was decent turnout with CREDIT. But participation started to fall off. The relative level of effort to spin up the recurring event outweighed the reach. As far as reasons this was likely the case:
 * Time of day was tough. It was challenging for most people outside of the Americas timezones, and even within the Americas timezones there were notable schedule conflicts. Doing multiple sessions for timezones would have been a burdensome scheduling and logistics problem, too.
 * The perceived size of the forum, and perhaps also the pressure associated with live demos, caused reservations for some, amplifying some concern about the risk of nonconstructive feedback.
 * Perhaps the right fora weren't targeted, or timing / frequency for targeting could have been improved, or both.
 * There has been a greater emphasis on learning through study (e.g., reading technical books) as opposed to prototyping "for the sake of prototyping". This doesn't lend itself as well to presenting demos, by definition, even if it improves efficiency and effectiveness for the people doing self study.
 * The feedback loop was hard to prescribe. It's unclear, but perhaps we could have encouraged more active engagement by the audience (e.g., questions), but then again more consistent encouragement of feedback on separate channels may have been more effective. It's possible both approaches may have helped retain and engage presenters and viewers.
 * The long form format of multiple videos may have been less than desirable for viewers. We tried to address this by using video timestamp links, but it may have been too much. Contrast this with the single topic (or two topic) Research Showcase, which is a more highly curated experience (including abstracts ahead of presentation) using a longer form video style.

One take away is we might consider recording demos separately and then sharing them through some sort of roll up, or on a case-by-case basis to the usual public outlets (e.g., wikitech-l). Teams are looking at how they might record demos as part of recurring meetings, although it may make sense for individuals to instead record videos separately and arrange for their posting - ideally through a central/shared account, possibly in coordination with a liaison.