Hi all Keller, Tim wrote:
Firstly, I think we need to decide who our target audience is. This morning I came up with notion that generally, users can be broken into several groups.
snip, snip
What do people think. Also, if it is the consensus that we should focus on groups 1-3, should we narrow our focus even more?
I have a hard time picturing how you could get something which would be meaningful/interesting for the novice group and not bore the hell out of the advanced group (and visa versa). The closest I can imagine is starting with some introductory stuff in 1+ half hour bytes and then progressing to more advanced topics with the idea that you have brought the novice group up to speed for the more advanced stuff and the experts can skip the early part and drop in later. The problem here is that now you have a lot more work to do. In turn, this makes me think a crawl-before-walk approach is best. Thus I would start with the novice group and, if you don't lose them, plan on going on to the deeper material in round two. I have just been viewing a tape I made of Brian Greene's Elegant Universe (Nova). I could not help watching it from the context of our interest in doing a similar thing for Linux. The Nova show was clearly aimed at the novice. And it worked very well. The general format was about a sentence or two on something with a quick transfer to some eye-catching visual effect ("eye candy"). For instance, jumping now to our topic, one could start out with some catchy "grab 'em" introduction like Narrator: We're going to let you in on a well-kept secret: you don't have to spend a lot of money to get good software for you computer. Followed by a shot of a "user" complaining that he/she is going to have to spend $X to upgrade to WindowsX, another that it will cost $Y to upgrade to OfficeZ and then one of our dorks with "Hey, I can do all that for $30, or even for nothing if I wish! From here you could move to a collage of floating GNU, LINUX, TUX's, Linus, Maddog, Stallman, etc with the narrator saying welcome to the world of what is called open source software, Linux, GNU, penguins saving money and evading the grasp of companies who try to make your their captive audience. etc Slide: Avoid the Gates of Hell, Use Linux! Narrator: Want to learn more? Just jump on board and fasten your seat belt. Take the tour of the world of Open Source! ? Snippet of a Disney world like train heading off to Open Source Land. Narrator; Let's start at the beginning, or actually the beginnings. First we have a guy in Cambridge (back drop changes to Stallman) who got very upset when he ran into computer programs that he could not see inside. It also bothered him that computer programs were not freely exchanged. (Back drop could have some key Stallman quotes on this issue) etc to gnu emacs etc Narrator: This leads into the "second beginning": Narrator: About this time, a young guy in Finland (Torvalds now on the background) was etc etc. snip, snip Narrator: So what exactly is Linux? (Background of floating packages of Redhat, SuSE, Caldera, etc). ---- Linux in the broad sense, GNU/Linux, Linux/GNU distros, snip snip Narrator: So let's take a look at a computer running linux (Background a KDE/Gnome desktop) Here is what you get. Notice that, as you might expect since they are all doing the same thing, it is very similar to various Windows desktops. You have menus, (Background open menu with mouse), you can open applications (Background open something which pops up quickly ), you can read mail (Background --- you've got the picture) you can "surf the web" (Background a good porn site :-)) etc. snip snip Narrator: So how do you get into this wonderful world etc etc. Well, as usual I got carried away but the above does show a few things. Principally, a lot of work would have to be done on getting those background shots since they are the stuff which keeps the audience's attention. Secondly, I found the actual script came fairly easily. The process was essentially to get and idea of flow (This would be a sequence of topics the group agreed flowed well, including nothing spurious and leaving out nothing necessary), picture what graphic (this is video!) would accompany/achieve that, and add the narration to keep the audience on track. Note also that one has to make sure one's internal enthusiasm is translated (and probably amplified along the way) to the screen. For example, if we were to get to the second, for-the-more-expert stage, I would want to see some "Hey this is cool" expletives in the script! At this point, the idea of sitting in a studio with a camera pointed at some "talking head" does not strike me as a good way to go unless you are interested in selling sleeping pills. Time to shut up and see what the rest of you think. doug