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Welcome to the Unicorn Meta Zoo, a brand new podcast by members of the Stack Exchange community team. If you want to avoid spoilers, jump straight to the audio. Listener grooveplex has started a wiki transcript of the episode. Please add to it if you are interested in helping out.

Participants

We're talking about why we're doing a podcast. (I believe this is the traditional podcast pilot topic.) It's not intended to replace Stack Overflow podcast, which is on hiatus. For one thing, our audience is much smaller. If you are reading this post, you are one of the super-engaged users we want to talk with. For another, I pitched this as a quick-to-produce podcast. It takes less than an hour to record and edit.

Links

• I mentioned the Meta Stack Overflow announcement, which includes a link to my UserVoice request (archived in the WayBack Machine).


• Abby's go-to site is Worldbuilding.


• Jon has a soft spot for Biblical Hermeneutics.


• Juan is a fan of Stack Overflow en español.


• This episode was sponsored by the Ask Question Wizard.

Meta

For recording we use Zencastr which has a free plan that allows up to three participants. Each participant channel is exported to an MP3 file when the recording session ends. In order to merge the three channels into one channel and add the intro/outro, I wrote
a script, edit_podcast.rb, to create FFmpeg commands. Juan M wrote and performed our music. Cover art was generated by balpha's excellent Unicornify script. For the moment, we're serving the files from a GitHub repository and you can grab an RSS feed there. It's not terribly useful just yet, but when we have more episodes, they'll be delivered automatically to your podcatcher of choice.

We mentioned that we might invite Jaydles to be a guest. We'd recorded the episode well before Jay left the company. I'd still be interested in having him on the show to find out what he's up to and get his thoughts after being away from the company for a while.

What do you think?

Take a listen and respond in the answers below.

feature-request

Not listened to it yet, so burn me if that was mentioned during it (and/or I missed something), but are you planning on releasing a transcript as well?

I can see it being useful for a couple situations:

• deaf/hard-of-hearing people who can't listen to it, obviously;


• non-native speakers who might want to check whether they heard right, or feed the text to an online translator or something;


• people who might not have the time to listen or prefer reading (as mentioned in comments);


• searching for a quote, something that was mentioned, with more ease than randomly skipping through 20+ minutes of sound (also mentioned in comments)

I'm not familiar with podcasts and I get they're mostly audio, but basically I think it would improve accessibility.

Since a bunch of people have indicated their desire for a transcript, I'm going to assume many readers are not interested in listening to the audio-only podcast. That's probably a good instinct. As I said in a comment:

It's a traditional first episode. So you can safely ignore it until we get to episode 7 and you find the show interesting.

Assuming volunteers continue filling in the wiki transcript (which was a pleasant surprise!) folks who don't want to listen can eventually get the answer to the question in the title. (Well, to the extent we answered it in the conversation.) But thinking about it, I probably should write up an answer that reflects my considered thinking.

Community Managers, you see, spend significant time in text. We write meta posts, type stuff in chat, edit documents to communicate with other teams in the company and so on and so forth. But we also have meetings via Google Hangouts grumble, grumple Meet. Some of our meetings are irrelevant to the community (HR policies and that sort of thing), but we spend a lot of time talking about the communities we are tasked with managing. While most of those conversations still aren't interesting outside of our team, I sometimes wish we could record our conversation so that we could share our thoughts with you, the engaged users of our sites.

I also admire the early Stack Overflow podcasts for being just the raw conversation between Jeff and Joel as they worked out what the site would become.

I love writing. Stack Exchange is a network built almost entirely on the written word, which is what attracts me to be a part of it. Writing is thought crystalized or, perhaps, fossilized ideas. But it's not a perfect tool. As Socrates said:

I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.

There's a deep irony that we only know what he said because Plato wrote it down.

At any rate, I spend a lot of time thinking about how my writings will be understood by various readers. It's an invaluable practice that makes my writing more clear and more accessible. While users can (and do!) ask me about my writing, I know that my words get quoted out of context or are misinterpreted in ways I can't correct. In short, I understand Socrates' protective attitude toward words.

I can't have a conversation with each individual user of the sites, even if y'all wanted that. Publishing a dialog between me and my colleagues gets me a good way there. (In the future, if this goes well, I want to interview users, which would be even closer.) Instead of worrying about exact wording, I can let my tone of voice and the flow of conversation help communicate more effectively and efficiently. The spoken word carries a different load than the written word.

If that sounds good, I encourage you to listen to the episodes as they come out. (We've been on a every-third-week recording schedule, so that's probably the rate I'll put them out.) If you can't or don't want to listen, I don't think you'll be missing anything really important. For the foreseeable future any news we discuss will be weeks or months old anyway. Also we focus on big-picture philosophy-of-community topics that'll be just as useful in the future as they are now. (Which means they might continue to be pointless, of course. ;-)

The recordings are raw and edited only by my script. We spend a couple of minutes deciding who will host the episode and thinking of broad questions to keep the conversation going. Then we record for 25 minutes or so and that's it. The goal is to keep the podcast project fun and not-time-consuming. But that doesn't mean we haven't prepared. In many ways, the podcast distills untold hours of conversation that we've had amongst ourselves into a format we are pleased to share with you, our communities.