OpenSource Connections
Category: Uncategorized
Last weekend I attended the inaugural eDemocracy barCamp in Washington DC. It was a very good experience and I definitely want to thank all those who organized it. I attended sessions on Interactive messaging, eGovernment in the UK, voting methods, and integration of large scale conversations, all of which were very interesting.
I also led a discussion on podcasting which focused on the uses of podcasting in eGovernment and political campaigns, as well as some discussion of where podcasting may be headed in the future.
Thanks to everybody who participated in that discussion. We covered topics such as how to determine your audience, and what is the effectiveness of podcasting. The answer we agreed on to these questions was that you will always be podcasting to a niche audience, and you need to keep that in mind when setting your metrics and your goals for the podcast. Given its relative ease to do and low cost for the tools needed, it can be an effective way to communicate with people.
The biggest challenge is how to distribute it to people and develop an audience, and there is no short answer on how to do that. It entirely depends on the target audience you are trying to reach.
We also discussed the tools available, including how to setup an xml file to work with iTunes distribution, using Audacity as a free audio editing tool, using TalkShoe for group discussions and an easy way to record a podcast, and using PodSafeMusic or Opuzz for inexpensive ways to get royalty free music and sound clips.
We also talked about how “polished” your podcast should be. Again, this depends on your audience, but one of the things I feel is important is authenticity. Making your podcast too polished can work against your group if you are trying to use it as a personal way to communicate with your listeners, and make it sound too much like a radio broadcast. Justin, who was visiting from the UK, talked about how some videos produced by government ministers on their trips to other countries were effective precisely because its a government minister being filmed by a handheld camera as he drives from one event to another. The same principle can apply to any podcast.
During the discussion, I also mentioned some of my ideas for creating a website that would allow invited users to submit online their own segments towards a podcast, record them online, and then at some regular time and date all submissions to that podcast get automatically stitched together into an mp3 file and sent out to a feed. One of the hurdles to podcasting is the time you can spend editing it and coordinating multiple segments and interviews, and I received good feedback that this may be a useful tool for some type of podcasts. Hopefully more on that idea later as I flush it out for my Bhag project, but I did enough coding on it over the weekend to know its possible.
Thanks again to everyone I met there for a great event!