A new idea?

Since we are currently speaking a lot about new ideas, maybe there is one.

MySQL provides a lot of Live Web Seminars being offered as On-Demand Webinars a few days later. This is a great offer - it provides presentations from experts that everybody can join in and watch or download as soon as they are provided on the On-Demand Webinar pages - all for free.

During the Users Conference, there were some "HackFests" where developers showed how to extend functionality in code right in front of the attendees.

Maybe this could be combined with Webinars? There are many topics that can be presented perfectly from code, from the command line or from the desktop, better than from conventional presentations. Some examples?

* How to set up a replication environment
* How to set up MySQL cluster
* How to use the MySQL Test tools
* How to create backups, showing different options
* Performance tuning
* How to get debugging information for bug reports
* How to enable plugins
* and so on, and so forth, ...

Personally, I need easy ways to get into a feature or a technique. Once I jumped over the first barriers, it's not that difficult anymore to hook in and get involved more deeply. But the most difficult part is the beginning and the lower the barriers to get started are, the easier it gets to enhance the skills.

This includes many benefits for MySQL, too. When people get an easy way to learn how to use such things, they will use it which will in return provide better feedback for MySQL.

Maybe there are technical issues that make it difficult to present Webinars like this at the moment - but hey ... this should not be a reason not to think about it ;-).