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Concerned with accessibility & engagement, from design to development, the #PlainTxtPodcast fosters a multimodal experience. By pairing transparent documentation w/ attributable collaboration, plain.txt delivers a digital humanitarian approach to podcasting.
http://plaintxtpodcast.com/
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Weeks 1-4 Aesthetic and Accessible Design Task Discussion #3

Closed RJP43 closed 5 years ago

RJP43 commented 6 years ago

Group Tasks

RJP43 commented 6 years ago

Review & post - one hour SE Radio; what is learned from the podcast(s)

Discussion Thread from below to be combined and organized into a wiki page regarding "podcast" design inspiration.

Episodes of Interest

Episode 51: Design By Contract Episode 143: API Design with Jim des Rivieres Episode 217: James Turnbull on Docker ** SE-Radio Episode 237: Go Behind the Scenes and Meet the Team SE-Radio Episode 238: Linda Rising on the Agile Brain SE-Radio Episode 263: Camille Fournier on Real-World Distributed Systems SE-Radio Episode 265: Pat Kua on Becoming a Tech Lead SE-Radio Episode 278: Peter Hilton on Naming

RJP43 commented 6 years ago

My Initial Reaction to SE-Radio Episode 237: Go Behind the Scenes and Meet the Team

Reaction to Site Design:

Reaction to Podcast Episode Content:

SAMPLES OF RELEVANT CONTENT:

Sample 1: (minutes 5-6)

One of the principles established by Markus is that every episode should combine the specifics about a particular technology or process with permanent computer science or software concepts. Every episode educate the listeners in some area that will remain relevant for years into the future, even if people stop using technology X Y or Z.

We want people to listen to the new episodes, but I encourage listeners to go back and, as I did, listen to the back catalog. We all take a lot of pride how relevant the episodes are even years after their publication date. We get download statistics from one of the services in our publication workflow showing 15,000 downloads the day an episode is published, and then about 1,000 more per month for years after that.

We think that the surge near the date of publication is due to subscriptions through RSS or iTunes, that auto-download each show. Probably the ones coming months or years later are search results on a keyword, or following a link from somewhere. We do not know how well an episode did for at least three years.

Sample 2: (minutes 7:30-8:30)

I will be talking to Forrest later in this episode. But right now, will talk about what I am trying to accomplish as the show editor. First and foremost, I want to continue the show as it has been, as you have come to expect it. The founders of the show have created something great and I want keep it that way. The 50,000 downloads we get for each episode is a great number for a specialized niche topic.

Since I became the editor in April of 2014, there were three active hosts. Must first effort was around adding hosts. We now have nine active hosts – myself, Eberhard Wolff, Jeff Meyerson, Tobias Kaatz, Johannes Thönes, Stefan Tilkov, Charles Anderson, Josh Long, and Sven Johann. Some of the hosts had podcasting experience but not on this show, while others were new to podcasting. Stefan has been a guest on the show twice (98 and 210) and Sven has been a guest once (224).

After adding hosts, my next moves were organizational. To get the new hosts trained on how to do an episode, I created a manual for hosts. Now I have some very exciting news. We are going to be open sourcing our show host manual some time in 2015. This manual provides detailed instructions for how we create an episode. I have shown it to a few people in the publications and media field already and gotten some feedback. We hope that people in the others in the podcasting and technical publications area will be find it useful. There will be an announcement on the show and on the show blog when this happens.

Sample 3: (minutes ~9 - ~15)

I will tell you a little bit about how we do an episode. First, someone comes up with an idea. The idea can be either a show topic, a guest, or both. There is a lot of discussion of topics on our internal email list. Some times I suggest a topic, other times the host who will be producing the episode comes up with a topic. Once I approve the topic, the host starts developing the show material.

The host writes an outline. This is where most of the work comes in. If the host is not already an expert on the topic – and most of us are not because, really, how many things can one person be an expert on? That part requires reading some books, papers, listening to conference talks, trying out the software, whatever the host needs to do to get a good idea of what the subject is about. The host is not trying to become an expert but needs to know enough.

Then the host puts his outline up on a google doc and then the other hosts have the chance to review and comment on it. The host makes some revisions, if there are a lot of comments, and the outline is finalized.

... (minute ~11:45: Time planned and going off-plan - shift in topic, but end result key important points and moment for guest to share resources) ...

Once the episode is recorded, the host writes the show notes and links, and then we hand it off to the media team at the IEEE Computer Society. Brian Brannon, who I will be speaking to later, manages that part of the process. That group of people do all of the audio editing and publications. This has been a huge benefit for the show of being part of the computer society. When I joined the show, there were volunteers on the team who did some audio and publication, but hosts had a much larger workload of audio production before handing the show off. Having a team of professionals do the media production steps has made it possible for hosts to focus more on producing content.

After we publish an episode, we discuss the show among the hosts. The other members of the team give the show host feedback on what we liked and didn’t like. We are all trying to learn and improve as show producers.

Sample 4: (minutes 15:30 - ~20)

The historical average over the 9 years is about 2 per month, though in 2013 and the first half of 2014 it dropped to around one per month. In 2014 we stabilizing the publication frequency and in the second half of the year, grew from once per month to twice per month. So far in 2015 we have produced at least two shows each month.

As we close out 2015, we plan to increase the publication frequency. There are several moving parts to get this all to work; if we can get where we want, then we will produce in the 3 to 4 shows per month range for the rest of this year. In the second half of 2015, I may add one show host. If this is something that you are interested in doing, then please reach out to me by email or through email, Twitter @robertblumen or on LinkedIn.

Like anything a podcast needs to grow and change. The current team want to keep bringing you great content in the traditional areas, and branch out into some new things. We are going to focus a bit more — and this is not a totally new thing but we are going to emphasize it more — on career and cultural aspects of SWE. We had two great episodes already in 2013 with Tobias Kaatz talking to Randy Shoup about job interviews and company culture. We have some other show ideas on the drawing board about career strategies, how to write a computer programming book, and other related areas.

...

We are now active on all of the major social networks. On twitter our handle is @seradio (no dash). Please follow us there. If you like the show, then retweet, favorite, or direct message us. Jeff Meyerson is running our facebook page, called Software Engineering Radio. Be sure to look for the Facebook page, not the Facebook group. There is a facebook group called Software Engineering Radio that has been inactive for several years. Tobias Kaatz is leading our group on Google Plus by the same name. I organize a group on Linked In with the same exact name as well. You can find any of these pages or groups by searching for Software Engineering Radio. Please follow us or join us on any of these platforms that you personally use. Starting with episode 218, we are pre-announcing upcoming episodes on our social platforms.

Another small change is our new show logo/favicon. This was designed for us by Shopey Mossavar-Rahmani and we are using it on all of our properties.

Sample 5

I am going to start with an interview that I recorded in mid-2014 with Markus Völter. I had planned to do this current episode some time in 2014; this interview was recorded about one year before the time that you will be listening. Some aspects are a bit out of date but I wanted you to hear it anyway. And then I will be talking to all of the current active hosts and members of the management team.

Sample 6

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Sample 7 podcastsplashpage

taylorcate commented 6 years ago

Reactions to SE-Radio Podcast: Taylor

The SER's dedication to make their content accessible and open source is commendable, but then again they've had a long time to perfect their process (12 years young this year). Robert Blumen, show editor, is really on to something when he describes his team's decision to structure the episodes around content that will referential even as technology and our interactions with it change and develop over time (around the 9 min mark in the episode). Releasing them in this way categorizes the show as an academic resource, citable for user's seeking content that is participating in the discussion of the field. I feel as though this is something we should keep in mind when writing and planning the episodes for Plain.txt. We discussed developing the twitter bot to mine for topics relevant to ongoing discussions in digital humanities, which will certainly relieve some of the stress of conjuring episode ideas from the air over an extended period of time. This engagement with contemporary and real-time discussions, however, must I think remain a controlled and monitored engagement and not a reliance on breaking-content for the topics on our show otherwise we will end up situating the podcast archive in a specific and dateable moment instead of designing it as a dynamic and referential resource for users in the years to come.

(10:30 min) I love this idea of collaboratively editing the outlines and scripts for each episode. Blumen describes the SE-Radio show's process of assigning one of the nine hosts for the show to each episode, responsible for drafting an engaging and enlightening discussion around a topic of their choice. The other hosts then hop on google docs and collaboratively edit the script. I think this is a really efficient method of delegating and balancing work between participating members of the podcast team as well as encouraging team members to explore issues and topics in DH (for our case) that interest them. There was some worry about having multiple hosts, we thought it might make the podcast too unpredictable, but I have listened to quite a few podcasts that employ multiple people as hosts and I find the variations in style more interesting than distracting. I think, rather than worry about the variations in voice or style of the individual, we should be more concerned with developing an awareness of the format and style of the podcast in general.

(21:00 min) Guest on the show, Markus Völter one of the other hosts for SE-Radio, describes some of the original decisions behind creating their show. He says he had heard of a lot of podcasts that were cropping up and began looking around for one devoted to topics in software engineering but came up with nothing. This desire to fill a void in the podcast world is not entirely unfamiliar to us. Becca says the idea for Plain.txt came out of looking up DH podcasts and coming up empty handed. It's such an interesting gap for the digital humanities community given that collaborative discussion on digital platforms is sort of what we're known for but lucky for us because we have a lot of room to make our show exactly what we want without worrying about copying existing examples.

Remaining thoughts I think listening to the SE-Radio Show, this episode in particular, was extremely helpful for us in this process of indentifying and conceptualizing exactly what we want our podcast to be. I feel extremely fortunate that we have this time to develop the website and hosting platform because I want to ensure that our work is as transparent and detailed as possible--and I know Becca shares these feelings as well. I'm also thankful that we have the opportunity to explore technologies and languages we have never dealt with before. Overall I think this assignment helped me conceptualize a little more what I think our end product will be and it also showed me how this strict documentation process will only enable our story to be passed down like SE-Radio Show's story is sealed in Episode 237.

taylorcate commented 6 years ago

Designland - Takeaways From the Era of A11y

I feel like this entire semester has been orbiting around accessibility and design. In Dr. Hayward's class we are redesigning the infamous Sakai and implementing accessibility standards from the start. In this class, we are tackling multiple forms of accessibility, particularly open source design and accessible/universal design. By choosing to do all of our documenting and file sharing through GitHub as well as hosting the Plain.txt website through GitHub pages we will make sure our entire process and resulting product is available to the public. If you ask me GitHub is probably the platform to do pretty much everything and anything but anyway...I'm getting off track. Today I'm updating the project on what I've gleaned from what I'm calling the Era of A11y: Episode 1, Lost in Designland. What we mean when we say aesthetic and accessible design is something that looks good to everyone, and I think that's a really great way to approach the design of a website. The idea is not to control the way people perceive your project, it's to anticipate the outcomes of as many people's perception as possible and attempt to make that a positive experience. My first experience designing anything with these ideas in mind was the Digital Accessibility conference we as a cohort put on here in February. All of our promotional materials, emails, and our program website were designed to meet accessibility standards and I know it took a great deal of effort on Becca's part to alter the WordPress template we used for the website to make it pass a CodeSniffer accessibility analysis. None of this effort was validated on its own, however; the overwhelming positive response we received in the days following the conference is really what proved to me that the time we are putting in to ensure our work is accessible and to spread the message through example is absolutely worth it. We are bringing people into the process and helping others do the same. If I've learned anything in my time at Loyola, it's that we need to be better academics and humanists and we need to be as inclusive and transparent as possible when the work we do exists to serve the public good. . . .

Stay tuned...Episode 2, Midterm Wakeup Wrap will be here soon!