Opening Up Patrons Calling, Join the 3rd!

(expect more such sketches)

Hey everyone! It’s exam time and I’ve been lossily compressing a lot of knowledge into my head. I only got around to writing a blog post now because I preferred to use my free time to actually write code for Citybound.

Today I want to share some lessons learned from the first two Patrons Calling livestreams, announce how I want to open them up and start planning the next one with you. I'll probably also create a post soon about the more or less boring code work I've been doing.

TL;DR: everyone will be able to watch live, Patrons of all tiers will be able to join as callers. Please participate in the Doodle linked at the end.

Lessons learned

If you haven't seen them yet, check out the first two Patrons Calling recorded livestreams:

I really, really enjoyed the first two Patrons Calling streams - the star of both was of course Jesse who turned out to be not only an interested and educated Citybound fan but also an excellent on-air conversational partner. Everyone who joined in chat also helped us to not run out of interesting stuff to talk about.

For the second stream I wanted to get more people on board, even though I failed to really give notice early enough - so I decided to open up the join-as-a-caller link to all Patrons. What also helped was that I accidentally made the stream public on YouTube, so all subscribers could watch it live. Thanks to this, a lot more people watched live, and towards the end of the stream Joey, a second fan and caller joined - making the call even more fun and interesting.

All of this made me reconsider using Patrons Calling as the strongest differentiator between Patrons/Non-Patrons and the different tiers of Patrons...

Opening up Patrons Calling

So these will be the new rules from now on:

Everyone will be informed about the chosen stream time

Everyone will be able to watch live

Patrons of all tiers will be able to join as a live caller or ask questions in chat

Everyone will be able to watch the recorded stream later (this was already the case)

So just to remind everyone of how we do this...

The Procedure

All of us find the most suitable time for the next stream. Whether you are a Patron or not, please fill out this Doodle and indicate whether you are Patron + Caller, or not. The poll will close next Monday, so make sure to vote until then At this point, I will announce the chosen date in a new blog post, already with a link to the upcoming YouTube livestream event page. If you join as a viewer or Chat Patron, you just need to open this same link when it's time. For everyone who wants to join as a caller, I will post a Patron-only post with the secret join-as-caller link on Patreon, roughly 10 minutes before the stream starts. You call using Google Hangouts, so make sure that you have that set up and working.

Note: soon, I will try to host one on a weekend, I'm aware that for some of you it's impossible to join during the week. I'll let you know!

All clear? Let me know what you think!