Hey, I set up a soundcloud account that we can use to host 180 minutes discussion on (more with monthly cost of 4, unlimited with 9€). It can be connected to all kinds of other social media but I don’t know how well this will let us share comments over time. For now it is better then nothing. Once we decide if we can integrate this and it makes sense we can look at this more closely I guess.
If we could link comments to a specific time somehow we could keep the discussion on the ER platfom. I don’t know how easy it is to comment without a soundcloud account per person.
I’ll forward the account access to @Noemi and @Nadia. If things go well we’ll eventually have to update the account details.
Thanks for setting it up, I got the log in info. I recognize that people have different preferences for internalizing content, for some it’s audio, for others it could be snappy videos or text… Either way, this doesn’t mean we can’t experiment and see. With youtube recordings it worked reasonably well, but I don;t know if it was worth the effort put in the setup- I still needed to edit it to 7 mins & upload on platform.
The thing is that to keep the conversation moving you still need to interact outside the one hour weekly call you know? So that takes us back to writing online
You won’t get rid of text - that’s for sure. Probably also good like that. Text can be auto-translated - speech first needs to be turned into text before that can happen (may become important eventually).
I think it is not exclusively personal preference - it also depends on the content and the situation (e.g. listening while doing something else).
Totally agree on the video editing thing - that is almost always a lot of work for dubious gain. There are exceptions (especially I you have no bandwidth and storage constraints) but in my experience audio is often the best in terms of cost/benefit if the content in mostly human-human interaction.
I like where this is going, thank you for setting up the account. Like many in the community I have a hard time wading through a lot of text and we don’t have the resources for a content manager- so we need to build new shared practices to make it easier to stay informed, catch up quickly and contribute.
We have tried some formats in the past like these honest skype video interviews about how some people are making a living. Then there are the futurespotters videos produced by @SamMuirhead. Very different styles, some of the videos have almost no views, others have over 10,000.
I think that audio/video from the hangouts can make a significant contribution towards helping us stay in touch and informed if we have a nice process for getting them out to the community. And if we embed them into edgeryders posts so people comment here, rather than on various platforms.
Another is setting up Ifttt.com recipes. I’ve been experimenting with the edgeryders facebook page and a wordpress blog I set up (but don’t really use). Results are iffy but I think it’s because I didn’t do a good job with the recipes and havent had much time to experiment/tweak more.
Videos and especially audio files I can get on a topic are usually the first thing I go over. I am already more than half through the ER channel on youtube, half without watching, just listening. The stuff that @SamMuirhead made is really good - I sure watched that. For me it often works like this: the extended audio records (e.g. your talk on lighthouse arts channel or at lausanne) give me the vibe and atmosphere of a place/thing, while the carefully edited videos are usually like the abstract of a scientific paper: extremely dense in important information (which needs the visual channel, and some of the background info I got through audio beforehand - to put it into context and make more sense of it).
I think views and dis/likes are unfortunately very unreliable metrics on the (youtube-)edge. We have to use our own brain.
Yeah I saw the news calendar. It had me a little confused because there was no call scheduled for today. Eventually I found it in the events of course. I’m not sure but perhaps it would make sense to merge news-calendar and even-calendar?
I very much agree with trying to keep the commenting on one (this) platform. I think it would be cool if one could “suck in” other platforms (like twitter, etc.) and comment here on several of them in the same context. That would probably be pretty much what the Ifttt.com thing could help with if I understand correctly. I would not push too hard for now. I’ve started with making mock-up interfaces with pen&paper, but I have to think a lot more about the different use-cases we have to cover. For me it could be e.g. a 7 inch tablet in a workshop or fablab that I stick on a wall or a machine so I keep in touch while working. Perhaps I can do a quick skype call, document what I’m doing, or monitor ER’s “radio traffic” via audio or a ticker. And for the lunch break, or while waiting on something for a couple of minutes I’d read a post or two and jot down some 140 char comments. Anything bigger and I’d be changing workplace to a desktop pc or notebook. Many “makers” will have a similar use case, but the vast majority will certainly want the interface optimized differently…
@SamMuirhead I could imagine you or others already went through these thoughts a couple of times here. If that’s the case I’d be interested if I can see some of the ideas that came up.
One more thing with community call - multimedia: we also don’t want to scare people off by recording all kinds of stuff. But I think audio is not sooo much of an issue.
