Screen Sprint

THE PROJECT

Produce 7–10 short instructional screencasts, and establish a WikiProject, in close collaboration with other volunteers. Last weekend of September, 2010.

The Wikimedia Foundation is developing a set of resources for creating instructional screencasts. Can you help?

What we're doing

We are hard at work on the Bookshelf Project, creating a collection of materials that help people understand the Wikimedia world and how to start contributing to our projects.

We believe that screencasts – or video demonstrations of how to use software – are a great way to reach a wide audience. We have seen some cool examples emerging in the Wikimedia volunteer community and from other sources. But there are some pretty big challenges involved in producing a good screencast, especially if you're on a tight budget and/or want to use free and open source software.

So, we want to create an online tutorial (using screencasts) that helps people get started on producing their own screencasts. And we want to work with the passionate and knowledgeable volunteers in our community to produce the best results and lay the groundwork for ongoing resources (perhaps as a WikiProject) for Wikipedians who want some support in producing screencasts.

How you can help

We've established WikiProject Screencast on the English language Wikipedia; please add your name to the participants list. As the project emerges in the coming days, please feel free to work on any of the pages, add your own pages, etc. We look forward to working with you!

There will be a kickoff event with 12 volunteers in late September 2010. Watch for lots of activity related to that event.

More information/planning page

Want to brainstorm the project, or see how we're planning to approach it? Watch this page: Screen Sprint ideas