For some time now, OpenRelay has been looking at ways to get the community involved in the open source side of the project. We’ve had several people who have expressed interest in getting involved, but there’s a steep learning curve to getting familiar enough with the code base to get started. Talking to the people interested in getting involved, we decided to start hosting a weekly Google hangout where I could walk through different aspects of OpenRelay to help people get up to speed. Before long, it became obvious that we should record these hangouts and make them available to the community at large, and a series called “Screenside Chats” was born.

The format is pretty straightforward. With input from our contributors, I pick a topic and prepare a reveal.js presentation. The interested parties get a Google hangouts link, and we converge at about 8:30 on Thursday evenings. I run through the presentation, attendees ask questions, and the whole thing gets recorded to YouTube. We don’t do any fancy editing, you get to see the conversation just as it happened.

We’ve been doing this for a few weeks now, and have just started making the videos available on YouTube. If you’re interested in catching up, check out the OpenRelay YouTube Channel. If you want join us for the live stream, keep an eye on our Twitter feed on Thursday nights around 8:30 Central Time. If listening to me talk for an hour isn’t your thing, you can also flip through the presentations on your own at slides.openrelay.xyz. I’d recommend hitting “S” to enter presenter mode so you can see my notes.