Tomcat Webinars review

[Mark Thomas <ma...@apache.org>]

Hi,

I wanted to provide some initial reveiw on the Tomcat Webinar series I
started last week.

Attendance for the live webinars was low with only a couple of people
attending the first (EU timezones) session and 5-10 attending the second
(US timezones).

The technology worked fairly well. Initially, I went with the default
settings which enabled attendee video. As a presenter this was rather
distracting since the UI reconfigures every time an attendee turns video
on/off. For the second presentation I went through and removed all the
features we don't need which should be less distracting for attendees
and presenters.

Recording is simple although conversion to mp4 is a little on the slow
side - not much better than real time.

Uploading to YouTube is simple although there are some small delays
while the video is processed.

Editing (trimming start and end) was also simple and performed on
YouTube. I looked at doing the editing locally but the OS provided tools
weren't great and significantly increased the file size. Probably mostly
user error but the YouTube UI was much easier to get to grips with.

We have had 175 views since the Webinar was uploaded with an average
viewing time of ~10 minutes. The whole presentation is ~30 mins. 35% of
views stopped after 20s. 45% had stopped after 60s. We then lost just
over 1% a minute until the end where there were 20% left. PMC members
have access to the YouTube account where they are free to explore the
stats for themselves. As we add more videos, the stats should become
more meaningful.

Overall, the live attendance was lower than I hoped but it is early
days. I have scheduled another couple of Webinars and I plan to see how
the stats unfold. I'm currently aiming for one every two weeks. If
anyone would like to volunteer for the Jan 19th slot, do speak up. I'll
manage the webinar technology side of things, you just need to give the
presentation.

It will be interesting to see what impact this has on ApacheCon. Given
the total number of Tomcat users, neither ApacheCon nor the Webinars are
(currently) reaching a significant proportion of them. My hope is that
the Webinars will encourage people to attend ApacheCon but we shall have
to see.

Alongside the Webinars, I have been using our Twitter account much more
frequently. Activity around this seems to be picking up slowly as well.

When our next board report rolls around, we should probably include some
variation of the above.

Mark

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