Merveilles Podcast

merveillesPodcast.md

Title:

• Merveilles Town Hall
• The People of Merveilles
• The Merveilles Show
• theVoice

Format:

• ~20' mini-interview to get to know a member of the community
• A community member interviews someone else and produces the episode, then the interviewee chooses the next person to interview. The former interviewee can also and produces the following episode, in a round-robin fashion
• Music is allowed, as long as it comes from a Merveillan - bonus points if it's the interviewee's!
• Published occasionally, "when it's ready"

Tone/Subject:

• Episodes should respect the rules of the instance, notably the code of conduct
• Episodes should also respect rules related to content like animal cruelty and sexuality
• To be as inclusive as possible, episodes should vary guests (or even producers!) and strike a balance between genders

For the title I don't have any preference, we can also allow people to vote on it once we have a few ideas. I thought about:

• The People of Merveilles
• The Merveilles show

Format:

• In my experience ten minutes is quite short as you probably just have the time to introduce the podcast and your guest. Make it around 20 minutes, 30 max.
• I like the idea of the interviewee choosing the next guest! But passing to him the production can be quite challenge for a few reasons: you might not be good at interviewing people, you may not have the time or the will to do it, you maybe don't know about podcast recording and editing. It makes coming as a guest a big responsibility and I'm not sure everyone will agree about it.
• Music can be fine as long as it's one of the town people and they agree to let us use it. If the interviewee agrees, we can also put his music as a break in the middle of the show.
• I agree with the "when ready" approach.

Tone/Subject:

• I think we should respect the rules of the instance in the podcast, notably the code of conduct.
• The show should also respect the rules related to content like animal cruelty and sexuality.
• The thing I'm wondering is how to approach some topics that are allowed in the instance but under trigger warning as they can create anxiety or stress. Things like climate change, mental health? Should we warn people about it at the beginning of the episode?

About our guests:

• To be as inclusive as possible, we should be careful to vary our guests and strike a balance between genders.

Back in the day™, the Flickr blog did interviews of Flickr members, and the interviewee got to choose the next person who'd get featured. It worked quite well (and I guess saved some work for the editorial team!) but it also kept the interviews inside a rather small circle. Merveilles is a small community, so that problem might not be so strong, but we do have to be careful to be as inclusive as possible.

Added all of your suggestions!

I only left behind the "trigger warning" point — my approach would be either to state it at the beginning of the episode (many great podcasts do it this way) or to keep potentially "triggering" discussion after the break, again with a warning at the beginning of the second segment.

Reasonable?

Would love to take part in this as well! A few suggestions: The whole thing should be self hosted, and not rely on any "podcasting directories" like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We should also transcribe the episodes in text and always have that version with it. I am happy to help with that part as it can be time consuming but really important for accessibility. Another thing about inclusivity is having a document that we could share reminding people about some common words in English that are really not inclusive even though they are every where: "hey guys" is so common and incredibly frustrating to many many people. The amount of content that I have been turned off by because it starts with this greeting is immense.

Would anyone be interested in organizing this podcast idea in a place like Matrix or an Etherpad/Hackpad?

A few ideas:

To address the 'Hey guys!' opening:

• Open each episode with the same phrase, maybe something like 'Greetings Townspeople!', in whatever language the host natively or chooses to speak
• End each episode in the same way with an appropriate sign off.

Content warnings:

• Most iOS podcasting apps that I have tried have chapter support for mp3 files or m4a files or both, on each topic it could be sectioned off into a chapter and then people can skip the parts that they do not want to hear. EDIT: I made a list of apps on iOS and Android that support podcasts, its at the bottom of this comment.
• Adding a list of topics to the description would give people an idea of what is discussed along with @RaelZero's suggestion audio warning at the beginning of the show.

Podcast clients with chapter support

Cross Platform (only Google Play on Android)

• Pocket Casts
• Radio Public

Android

• SoundWaves (F-Droid,GP)
• AntennaPod (F-Droid,GP)
• PodcastAddict (GP)

iOS

• Overcast
• Castro 3
• Downcast (Paid)

I think we've got a nice set of guidelines now. Should we start? 😄

I'm happy to provide my music for the podcast if anyone is interested :)

Has there been any recordings done yet?

Yes we did a recording, Raelzero now has to edit it and publish it so we can get opinions about it. :)

Sweet! thats awesome to hear!

I would love to take a listen to the raw recording sometime. I don't know if you would want to make it public but maybe if some other people listened we could get inspired to edit it about into some form