Workshop Documentation
It's very important, and quickly becoming a standard practice, to publish all the slides and visual/audio/text/code materials of the workshop, so the participants can refer to it after (and sometimes during) the session. Why is that?
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| if you have ever attended a workshop you know how hard it is to be extremely focused for all the duration of the workshop. Having the chance to look back at the content will make participants enjoy the workshop a lot more and will solidify their understanding of what was done during the session. |
| some participants like to take notes when attending workshops, sometimes this practice will distract them from what is really going on, mostly in hands-on sessions. Sharing all the content with the participants will let them free from the taking notes struggle, and will make them focus more on what is happening in front of their eyes! |
| having access to workshop's content and to real time documentation of the session will give participants the chance to share it with others, amplifying the communication of the project |
Sharing content - There are many tools out there in the internet jungle, that will help you hosting and sharing your content. Some are more specific for certain kind of media, some are more suited for your needs because of amount of space, pricing policies, licensing policies etc... It's very hard to cover them all, so we'll just suggest the most popular ones.
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| To share presentations and slides you can always rely on services like Google Slides or Slideshare. They will offer you the chance to send a link to the participants and eventually embed the presentation in your workshop communication (eg. in a blog post). Unfortunately there are no popular open source solutions we know of, yet. |
| To share text and notes you can easily rely on Hackpad or Google Docs. You could also offer participants the possibility of adding notes to your document (and eventually contributing to it) to keep the conversation alive after the session. |
| To share code the best way to go is a Git based hosting service like Github or Bitbucket (or Gitlab if you have your own server). These version control services will let you host your code, take track of all changes with a permanent history and will let participants and other people not only download but also fork and work on your code to make it better or to create other applications starting from your example. If you just need a link to share your code and don't need the version control infrastructure, you can always use copy&paste services like Pastebin. |
| Some files won't fit in the above examples, you can always share an archive with all the files you have used during the workshop session using hosting services like WeTransfer, Dropbox or OwnCloud. They will generate a URL you can share with participants to download all the content. |
Documenting the session - It's also very helpful to document the workshop session itself. You can do that by taking pictures, videos or streaming the session online so that the people who could not attend can still enjoy a part of the experience. Collecting shareable media about the session will make your communication more effective.
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| About documenting the session, it's always a good idea to ask the participants if they desire to be photographed or not. You can easily do that at the beginning of the session. Depending on the legislation about privacy of your country you might need to submit a paper to the participants that they can sign if they allow to be photographed or videotaped. Some info can be found here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law) |
| About pictures, it's not important to have a professional photographer. Pictures taken with a smartphone are usually good enough to be published and shared online. Nowadays it might happen that participants will take pictures as well, it's a good idea to ask them if they want to share the pictures with you so you can use them for communication purposes, that will generally make them feel more part of the project! |
| About videos, it's generally harder to make a good video without proper devices. In our experience having a dedicated video maker for the session will make the video documentation exponentially better. |