[evergreen-outreach] road to 3.0 video series

[Rogan Hamby]

Partially for documentation purposes and partially for discussion I thought
I'd start a thread discussing how the Road to 3.0 Video Series went.  I'm
going on memory so Kathy may correct me.

As we discussed promotion efforts for 3.0 one thing we wanted to try was
short videos that could easily be shared on social media.  Several people
had similar ideas for this independently and we discussed it as a group.
Kathy and I have both done some video work in the past so we felt capable
(note I say capable, not expert) in accomplishing some for this purpose.
She and I brainstormed some ideas and hammered out a schedule via a Google
spreadsheet.

Kathy created the first one and although we were using different tools we
collected some common elements in a Google Drive to give them a similar
format and appearance.  To host these we had access to some other Youtube
channels community members had created but we wanted something branded as
Evergreen so Dan Scott helped out since he created the Evergreen community
G+ account and added a Youtube channel with Kathy and I as admins.

In the end she and I created a total of four videos (two each).  The
Youtube channel got 130+ subscribers so we were able to do some Evergreen
specific branding on it (yay!) and the videos got 1,986 views as of this
morning.  The promotion also got some exposure on the Facebook and Twitter
feeds.  The feedback was universally positive and for an experiment I think
it went very, very well.

That wasn't without spending resources.  You can think "I'm going to do
this quick and dirty" but once you start you want a certain degree of
polish and by the time all is said and done it's a bigger commitment than
you'd planned on.  Takeaway - these aren't tiny projects to do.  A five
minute video can take substantially longer between setup, video work, etc...

All in all I think they are worth doing in the future but we will probably
adjust what we do.  Specifically, doing features still in development is
great but problematic so we need to have reasonable expectations about
doing those.  I think Kathy and I did well at managing that but if we bring
in others to help who don't follow the development closely it could cause
confusion.  We had more than one private IRC exchange of "Is your VM doing
that?  No, maybe I need to update.  No, maybe an update broke this.  No, I
do need to update.  I'm missing patch X."  So, we need to consider this in
terms of who does what videos, how stable the development is and what we
publicize in terms of ongoing efforts.

Final thought - I think there is value in continuing to do these about a
variety of these and not necessarily tied to releases though release based
ones are good as well.
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