Re-thinking our engineering hangouts

[Alan Pope]

Hi all,

While I'm was on the Ubuntu On Air Engineering Hangout today I was
looking at the stats for the channel and wanted to share some data,
and propose some changes.

The headline is, "nobody" watches the videos, and those that do, don't
watch the whole thing.

Looking back between March to December 2014:-

Month, Es­tim­ated minutes watched, Av­er­age view dur­a­tion,
Av­er­age per­cent­age viewed

March 2014        22,072    6:07    12%
April 2014        88,963    7:43    17%
May 2014        32,962    8:00    16%
June 2014        66,983    11:17    21%
July 2014        43,854    7:46    16%
August 2014        48,880    9:02    16%
September 2014        41,073    7:42    14%
October 2014        32,357    7:39    14%
November 2014        64,621    8:21    16%

Seems we have a very small number of people who watch these hour-long
videos to the end, with a significant number who watch only a small
portion of the video - perhaps just a few minutes.

Looking further it seems the highest viewer numbers are for the Q&A
videos - primarily sabdfl ones, followed by the other community team
Q&A sessions. I can provide these stats if required.

The Engineering Hangouts specifically don't get a huge number of views
and don't generate buzz. I believe there's a few reasons for this:-

1) We don't promote the engineering update hangouts as much as some of
the Q&A sessions
2) The videos are cover diverse topics within an hours - device
application development, cloud, infrastructure, image building,
toolkit / sdk etc. So finding something appropriate to your interests
usually means sitting through stuff which is less interesting to you
3) They're mostly technical and interesting only to developers, and
not end users
4) They're hard to find once they're done as they drop off the home
page of ubuntuonair.com and are replaced with some other video
5) They're too long. People have short attention spans, they don't
want to eat an hour of their day watching this, but might consume a
shorter chunk - maybe up to 10 mins of focussed content.
6) They're not accessible / searchable - so people can't link to a
specific part (like an email of a thread) to pass on information, but
only link to the entire video.

So my proposals assuming the above are true at least in part:-

* We should make shorter, focussed videos. e.g. I do a core apps video
every week, Will does a desktop one, Mike does a community one. Not
all at the same time, not all together, and not an hour long. Each
person does a 10 min video about their subject.

* Each video is posted to a blog style posting at ubuntuonair to
replace the static home page. It's a wordpress site so very easy and
familiar for any participant to create a post, embed a video and paste
in a few lines summarising. Posts should have a tag such as coreapps,
desktop, community etc. This makes it easy for external people to link
to specific posts, subscribe (via RSS) to one 'channel' (e.g. 'I am
only interested in cloud updates, give me Jorge in my face every
week').

* We stop using the UbuntuOnAir youtube account for these individual
videos, but let each person create the video hangout from their own
Canonical or personal YouTube account and just link to it in the
wordpress post on the site. That way we don't have to share
UbuntuOnAir youtube creds around, people just need an account to post
on the wordpress site.

* Continue using the UOA YT account for any multi-person videos or
community Q&A where any one of a number of people may start the video.
Those also get posted blog-style to the UOA site.

Make sense, have I missed anything?
-- 
Alan Pope
Community Manager

Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope at canonical.com
http://ubuntu.com/