Screencast Instructor and Producer Incentive Program

Thanks for posting this add1sun, I've been running a little behind.

Yes, the idea was that we would offer a 0:15 (15 second) commercial to both the producer (the person/group editing and polishing the video) and to the instructor. Initially I was thinking of a reward system where we could give points and possibly redeem them for things like blip.tv or flickr annual subscriptions, etc... The problems with this model are numerous and potentially tedious to maintain. How many points is what service worth, keeping a db, ensuring proper payment and if redemption is a pain its just not going to carry through.

The idea of providing a commercial to both the producer and the instructor provides many inherit benefits. Perhaps the two greatest are the foreseeable benefit in quality of material and the inexpensive mass advertising to the instructor/producer. If an instructor is going to place a :15 ad at the beginning of the lesson for his/her company I would imagine that the quality would be really great because that ad is keeping them responsible and allowing them to show off to a rather large audience. The commercials are better than any commercial that you can buy for tv, because that commercial is permanently fixed there for the life of the video. I don't think we should guarantee that, just in case dojo opens an internet streaming tv station or something in the future and would like to have dynamic ads, but that's the intent, at least for now. The commercial/message can be anything the instructor/producer would like as long as it is rated G and of good taste and design. We wouldn't want the ad to reduce our impression of quality and good values. Of course future systems of regulation and guidelines can be implemented. The important thing here is that both ads will be run back to back at the BEGINNING of the lesson. Why at the beginning? To ensure exposure, everyone is practically guaranteed to watch the ad unless they skip forward. Also I don't know if there would be any issues with our CC license on videos and the private ads containing elements that they might not want distributed. If the CC slate came after the ads would this remedy the issue and was there even an issue to begin with?

I have not decided yet if I would think that individuals could sell their ad time to say another drupal house or design firm. If we did I think they need to follow the same basic guidelines for time frame, etc... And that we insure that the dojo will not be damaged or their image or reputation blemished by such practices. I also think it would be important that we do not offer credits. If you don't run your ad in the lesson you taught or produced that's it, its filled with a slug and you can't redeem for later time. These simple guidelines remove much of the management responsibilities of the dojo and allow us to focus more directly on our primary mission of serving valuable information in an easy to access method to the community at large.

Also for this system to work we need to have a registration process for both instructors and editors. I've been thinking on several methods but I think we can apply some of the methods we currently use at "The Real Estate Book of Lubbock" (a company I work for as well) for selling our pages and who obtains the cover shot on the magazine. I started outlining this but I think I would like to think about it more before giving an outline here. Please comment and give suggestions and I intend to post back when I've thoroughly thought through the process and have a presentable model.

I use to work at KCBD-TV here in Lubbock we had standard graphics packages that we used in all of our on-air material. We did this to maintain constant branding and I think that it could be of tremendous benefit in this situation as well. Not only would a video graphics package help us enforce our branding image (by the what is our brand? another issue perhaps?) it will also allow for the task of producing/editing our screencasts easier. By easier I mean you already have a graphic element and all you have to do is drop it on your timeline. Boom! Poof! your done... That's a bit oversimplified but graphics for URL's, API Docs, Full Screens (Full Screen with image, half screen image with text, full screen without image, moving background element, etc...), lower-third keys, OTS's (over-the-shoulder), Attribution slates. I know we don't exactly have a use for all these elements now, but the effort required to make a complete set is hardly more exhausting then just creating just a few elements, most the pieces can be recycled from the previous element anyhow. Also a consistent open would be a MUST, we need something that is an advertisement for the dojo and lets people know they are watching a dojo lesson, as we are building a brand by reputation of the content we offer. We could supply all these materials and possibly voiced content for attribution, "The following screencast is brought to you by..." then cut to slate/0:15 spot. (See PBS prime time shows "nova, wired, pov, etc..." for clean implementation of slates and voice introductions, but not for the rest of the graphics they tend to be cheese.

Another thing we did at KCBD was providing editing guides to our new editors, unfortunately these usually took place verbally but I propose a written document. The editing guide outlines desired program format, 5 minute introduction, 4 segments, duration, total run time, etc... The editing guide could also supply information for the acceptable/desired use cases for graphics in the graphics package, i.e.. when the instructor says go to such and such url use the url animation and type the url in the box. That's just an extremely simple example but you get the point. We can export the animations as targa sequences to insure their use across virtually any platform, Avid, Final Cut Pro, Pinnacle, After Effects, etc...

Ok, this is just a portion of my model. Please comment and help acknowledge potential bugs and issues with the proposed model. I think this will help us drastically in the arena of producing higher quality material and insuring that our screencasts get out there in a more expedited fashion.

Peace,
-mpare
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Pare Technologies
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Wonderful stuff, mpare! While I've been thinking much along the same lines, yet it would take me weeks to provide such detail.

Couple points/issues off hand (with more to follow)...

* High quality production guidelines are essential, yet the format could vary (some ideas here - http://drupal.org/node/201890#comment-665478).
* Regarding ad time for teachers/producers OR selling ad time to somebody else, I think we have some options there. What about a short (paid, relevant) ad AND a credit for the producer/teacher? That's more along the lines of what you'd see on 'Charlie Rose' or 'Nova'. From what I can gauge, the big issue would be the issues/complications that come from bringing $$ into the equation. While that sort of discussion warrants a separate thread, I think a hint of a potential solution/conduit for $$/funds can be found here - http://groups.drupal.org/node/6943#comment-20631

It's going to take a LOT of time to properly implement what we're starting to hash out. The more support we have, the more value we can create for Drupal.

Much more to follow....

If the goal is produce a gold standard Dojocast, we may want to leave it up to the 'producer' regarding selling adspace. If the production and advertising guidelines were clear, we probably could leave it up to the individual producers and teachers to deal with the money issues.

Further elaboration can be found here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/8073#comment-24639

Another alternative to monetary incentives I thought of is to provide instructors with a license to some of the more feature rich screencast production or video editing tools. For instance, it may be possible to get TechSmith to donate some Camtasia licenses or strike some bulk discount, possibly in exchange for advertising on the site. I'm not an expert on screencast software, so Camtasia is just an example. If there are better tools, those might work too. Admittedly, open source tools can probably be combined to provide all the same functionality, but a simple all-in-one software package might make it easier and faster to get tutorial screencasts posted.

Let's use node_profile for our user accounts, so we can have a video CCK field for each user. This file-type will accept one h.264 video at 640X480 with a maximum file size of xxxMB, and will only be viewable by that user and any Site Administrators. When we are creating the finished screencast, we have only to visit the profile of the user who just presented the lesson, grab the vid file, and drop it into the beginning of the lesson.

If there's no video file present when the screencast is in post-prod, then the first 0:15 seconds of the screencast gets filled with a pre-selected ad for the dojo team, rather than the presenter's "award" ad. Hey, if you don't have your video ad uploaded to your profile by the time you finish teaching a lesson, you forfeit your "rights" to that ad placement as your reward for teaching.

As we now have some good production guidelines to work with http://groups.drupal.org/node/8945, the only issue really comes down to what I addressed here - http://drupal.org/node/203813#comment-687090. Quite simply, if the teacher and/or producer would rather have a monetary reward instead of their own ad, the adspace could be provided to a sponsor. Issues regarding how/who handles money and also what kinds of sponsors will be acceptable and will still need to be worked out and clarified - http://drupal.org/node/206158

Closing and resetting here - http://drupal.org/node/574170