I think it may help to focus on the problem. For example, is there really a barrier for new organizers joining? What is it? If it is tools, then what about the tools is intimidating? Probing that angle further, might give a better idea to what could resolve the problem.

I personally struggle to see how a presentation format would resolve the issue. I think there's merit to a document, that by nature, allows the individual to reference it, go back to it frequently, use it to link out of, etc. By nature it invites them to sit with it, and they may not understand it all on first go, and that's okay too. It also hints at a little bit of the self-directed nature of being an organizer. Not that anyone should feel alone, but rather organizers have agency to guide their own experience.

On the other hand, this could totally just be an exercise of transferring the doc contents into a presentation - sure, that's fine. I have no objection to that, if there's a desire to do so from an aesthetic, info hierarchy, or facilitation standpoint.

(I also acknowledge, I've been slightly distanced from organizing efforts, so if I'm totally off the mark, that's on me, and so I could be wrong.)

I think the idea was less document vs. slide deck, and more about presenting onboarding in a more accessible and easy-to-parse way. Having a slide deck makes it easy for any current organizer to onboard a new organizer(s) in a quick one-on-one session - making sure they don't leave anything important out.

By nature it invites them to sit with it, and they may not understand it all on first go, and that's okay too.

speaking of "all on first go", there's the concept of "drip marketing", where the "campaign" is not all at once, but a gradual thing to lead busy ppl through. Some have tried to transfer the principles to onboarding and volunteer efforts (as opposed to marketing/selling angle)
https://www.pardot.com/lead-nurturing/create-onboarding-drip-campaign-pardot-case-study/

I believe this chatbot was 18F's experiment with "trickling" onboarding:
https://github.com/18F/dolores-landingham-slack-bot

Messages will be scheduled once per day and will trickle out to employees over the course of 60 days.

Maybe we could add a "drip" component to organizer onboarding. Either email or slack or just a doc with personal checkins, or whatever :)

How would this complement the Trello onboarding template from @patcon ? Was Trello seen as a barrier?

I would list Trello as one of the barriers, yes. At the very least, if we're going to use Trello and Loomio, we should have a way to onboard people and train them to use these tools.

Also, fwiw Ganesh (as a relatively new organizer) voiced last week that the emphasis of recent onboarding pitches on "keep-the-lights-on" hacknight tasks made him feel that being an organizer was just about the hacknight tasks, and that there wasn't a solid invitation to the more long-term strategizing. I think we intentionally focused on "core" tasks, but it made me realize that we perhaps should be more explicit about the sky being the limit, and long-term thinking/planning is welcome.

We used to have a portion of monthly organizing meeting where people could define a long-term planning role and take on a term. Should we bring that back? It was perhaps not super-successful, but it was still a signal that that thinking was welcome :)

Could I start a proposal for that here, or should I create another thread @davidcox?