I have recently been asked to try to improve the viewership of our hangouts. However, there is an issue that I have been trying to consider...and am not sure how to move forward.
It seems that we have high demand for people to listen to the raw audio of the hangouts we have--before the edited versions can even be started. I am nearly certain that those people who go to dropbox to download it do not contribute to the viewer count by listening to the finalized versions.
I also want it open for others to record. The reason for this is because I would like to keep hangouts as open as possible for others to potentially monetize by taking the content, editing it and making their own bitshares-related news platforms. Essentially you could all create your own 10-15 minute youtube videos or podcast segments, or even written articles from the hangout content (which I personally view as "mini-conferences") and post it to your own sites. Who knows, you might even be able to use Roadscape's open source code to get people to monetize it with bitAssets--helping to establish the foundation for a true economy. You all are, after all, the DAC-Savvy investors who will drive the incentive for future BitShares-based chains being sharedropped!
It is already apparent that hangouts (miniconferences) are growing into something closer to full-fledged conferences...and I fully expect that trend to continue. And your showing up at these basically equates to a free press pass for any interested in the content. This is huge and cannot be understated! Though I am not altogether certain how many people fully understand the value of us having our own free-to-attend, weekly conferences.
So all these things that we already offer, as you can see, tend to fly in the face of us being able to maximize viewership for our own sake...because these were intended to be completely open conferences with extremely low barriers to entry so as many people as possible could attend and report live from our hangouts/conferences. This was hoped to help change the paradigm for how most conferences are currently run in the bitcoin/altcoin ecosystem.
In fact, when Methodx came out with NullStreet and told of his hopes to make NullStreet a community-owned and run news/marketing platform, and expressed an intent to have the delegate use multisig to give power to the community on how to best spend the funds, I was so immensely pumped. I immediately reached out thinking we might be able to finally get our community working on creating and advertising each others' content that was based off of our hangouts and future conferences. So pumped in fact, that I even set up a NullStreet room with special privileges for the members/volunteers so they could begin having "secret sauce" meetings on how to move forward with planning.
I had hoped that our DAC-Savvy investors would eventually begin using this content and propagating it, but it seems the best laid plans tend to never work as hoped. This, of course, is to be expected. So I pivoted. I ran for a delegate (and got it in! thanks everyone who voted for fuzzy.beyondbitcoin, btw!) and immediately hired the volunteers who worked to make the hangouts sound more professional (thanks to Mira and Emailtooaj on this). They are not paid enough in my opinion for the amount of work we will all need to do before the marketcap starts significantly rising, but at it is very appreciated nonetheless because we all understand how disliked the idea of "share dilution" is by many in our community.
So now that I have expressed all that is on my mind, reaffirmed why we initially started this whole hangout/conference platform, my thoughts on how NullStreet and the community marketing teams could utilize our conferences to further legitimize BitShares and themselves as "the real deals", let me get to the question:
Should the Beyond Bitcoin crew be posting raw hangout content? See the Poll above and give your opinions on any of what I have stated below.