Episode 101: Inside CHAOSScast With Your Producers  ## Metadata - Author: [[CHAOSScast]] - Full Title: Episode 101: Inside CHAOSScast With Your Producers - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/397f41ae-38e8-4015-9530-3690d7d1b67b ## Document Notes ## Highlights - The provided podcast episode does not contain any key statistics. The episode focuses on the production process of the CHAOSScast podcast and doesn't present any numerical data or statistics. (source: [0-1805.098sec]) ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6580dcdc-3471-42a7-9763-15f8cff08e09)) - Here are five reflection questions based on the CHAOSScast episode: 1. **What are the biggest challenges in producing a community-focused podcast, and how can these be overcome?** Consider the scheduling difficulties, the need for diverse voices, and maintaining community engagement throughout the process. 2. **How can we improve the process of selecting topics and guests to ensure relevance and variety?** The hosts discuss community input, trending topics, and the balance between established and new voices. 3. **What strategies can be employed to effectively promote a community podcast and increase its reach?** This includes social media, cross-posting, and creating curated collections of episodes. 4. **How does the community-oriented editing process impact the final product and the overall experience for participants?** This aspect of their process aims to ensure comfort and satisfaction among all those involved in creating the podcast. 5. **How can we leverage the podcast to better showcase the contributions and experiences of diverse members of the CHAOSS community?** The "20 Minutes of CHAOSS Africa" segment is highlighted as a successful example. Transcript: Alice Sowerby Podcast, where we share use cases and experiences measuring open source community health. I'm a senior operational leader in tech, Alice Saurby, and I'm currently providing program management support to the FreeBSD Foundation. I'm active in several open source projects, including managing this podcast with K-Offs along with Harmony and editing the OSPO book, The To-Do Group. And I'm based in the UK, not too far from Bath. Harmony Elendu And me, Harmony and Lendu, I'm a project manager. I currently do, I'm a project and product manager. I currently do some project management work in open source. I also do some stuff in To Do Group. And I am the technical lead in the Kales chapter. I do more or less in speaking, writing, and I love things that surround documentation. For fun, I play board games and a couple of other stuff, cheer with friends and lots more. Alice Sowerby And I'm Dawn Foster. Dawn Foster So I am the Chaos Director of Data Science. I'm also a board for Chaos, and I have a few other roles in other projects. I'm on the board of Open UK. So like Alice, I am based here in the UK, just north of London. And I'm also co-chair for the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group. And like Harmony, I also like to play board games with friends. It's loads of fun. And I also spent a lot of time playing with my 3D printer, which is a new thing for me. And it's apparently a mighty hobby. That's awesome. Alice Sowerby And I think if I saw on LinkedIn correctly, you've been making chaos earrings. Is that right, Dawn? I do. Dawn Foster For the audio listeners out there, I'm actually wearing a pair right now. Yes, I make chaos earrings and I've also been making chaotic pendants, both of which we are going to be giving away at ChaosCon in Brussels in February. So if you're going to be there, hit me up for some earrings or necklaces or keychains. Alice Sowerby Yeah, the last time I saw you gave me some of which I guess is the first generation ones, which are made of little beads, handmade. And now, as with all things, robots are making them. Dawn Foster Yes, indeed. I designed them myself. But the yes, the 3D printer robot makes them for me. Harmony Elendu Yeah, honestly, that's awesome. I'm just the only one that can wear the Chaos rings. But, yeah, I'd love to have some. Dawn Foster Well, we're doing key chains and necklaces to be more inclusive because not everyone has their ears pierced. So ChaosCon is going to have all the things. Harmony Elendu Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dawn Foster So Happy New Year, everybody. Alice Sowerby And in this podcast, we are going to be lifting the lid on how we make Chaos Cast, which is pretty interesting, actually. So let's just talk about how we all got into doing Chaos Cast. So Dawn, you'll have to start because you were here before I was. Georg Link actually started the Chaos Cast podcast a while back. Dawn Foster So it's been running for many years and people got busy and it sort of languished for a bit. And I picked it back up about a year, year and a half ago. And we started doing regular episodes. So about every two weeks again, which is what we used to do with the podcast. And I had been a guest and one of the hosts for when Georg was running it. So it was just kind of a natural fit. I happened to have the free time to do it. And so we, yeah, we started doing them again. And then like happens, I started to get too busy and I couldn't really keep up with the load. And so I met Alice actually at the Open Source Summit in Seattle. Alice Sowerby And I thought, wow, I think she'd be really great for the podcast. And now here she is. I was very honored to be asked. I think I'm just one of those people who needs to be asked to do things. It doesn't necessarily always occur to me to like, oh, so I put myself into those spaces. It was really nice to be asked. And it's something that I could do asynchronously, sort of as and when I had time. And because I don't use social media generally, because I have RSI, which means I have to really, really think about what I do with my hands to not aggravate it. So I don't do a lot of scrolling on my phone, which means I don't use social media, which means that if I want to be visible, just means not reading and posting on social media a lot. So I thought, actually, podcast, it's all talking. So why not do that? But Dawn gave me a couple of training sessions on how to use some of the tools and adopt the processes. There's actually quite a lot of moving parts for the podcast, more than you might think. And I'm just trying to think, what point did I get to where I thought we should have another person doing this? It might have been when I was, well, you tell me Harmony, was I asking just about Chaos Africa? Like, can we get someone from Chaos Africa to help? Or did I make a general request? Because I cannot actually remember how you ended up coming aboard. Harmony Elendu It was actually a general request. So that day I was less busy. I love like giving like a helping hand in the chaos community. So I just popped up on Slack and I was like, who could help do this and do some stuff? And I was like, yeah, let me just help out. And without the background, Chaos Cast is like my first podcast recording. It's my first, everything that has to do is producing a session on podcasts, right? So Alice was helpful. She brought me in. She had a couple of training sections, and she told me, is that a program we'd love to do? And I was like, yes, let's hear about the experiences. We came about a program called 20 Minutes of Chaos Africa, where we got contributors to come and tell us how we're doing in the community. Basically inspire new folks with their own experiences and how they got to know about chaos amongst other stuff yeah so it's been exciting i met alice through slack in the community And so much fun i met amazing people we have talked about various products and i'm happy to have co-produced over five podcasts. I think it's almost 10, but maybe over five podcasts. Been exciting. Alice Sowerby Yeah, I really enjoyed working with you, Harmony, and getting to know you. And actually, I've seen like you've really grown into doing this podcast stuff, particularly the hosting. Dawn Foster I really like listening to the way you host the podcasts. Harmony Elendu Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dawn Foster I've really liked a couple of those Chaos Africa podcasts. It was just so interesting to hear people's stories about how they got involved in chaos and how they've used what they learned in chaos to contribute to other communities. And it was just really interesting because these are people that I kind of work with in the community, but didn't know that much about. And so some of those podcasts are really interesting. Harmony Elendu Thank you so much, Tan. We'll do more of it, actually. We'll have more sections coming up. Alice Sowerby Let's talk a little bit about ... ([Time 0:00:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3b093e2c-caa1-4ae1-8789-4609e84950b3)) - **CHAOSScast Revival** - Dawn Foster revived CHAOSScast after a period of inactivity. - She had previously been a guest and host, making it a natural fit when she had free time. Transcript: Alice Sowerby Actually started the Chaos Cast podcast a while back. Dawn Foster So it's been running for many years and people got busy and it sort of languished for a bit. And I picked it back up about a year, year and a half ago. And we started doing regular episodes. So about every two weeks again, which is what we used to do with the podcast. And I had been a guest and one of the hosts for when Georg was running it. So it was just kind of a natural fit. I happened to have the free time to do it. And so we, yeah, we started doing them again. And then like happens, I started to get too busy and I couldn't really keep up with the load. And so I met Alice actually ([Time 0:03:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5605e256-ff45-47f5-9a0a-0ed0d0166680)) - **Alice Joins** - Alice Sowerby joined CHAOSScast after meeting Dawn Foster at a summit. - Sowerby's RSI made podcasting appealing since it doesn't involve much typing/scrolling. Transcript: Dawn Foster At the Open Source Summit in Seattle. Alice Sowerby And I thought, wow, I think she'd be really great for the podcast. And now here she is. I was very honored to be asked. I think I'm just one of those people who needs to be asked to do things. It doesn't necessarily always occur to me to like, oh, so I put myself into those spaces. It was really nice to be asked. And it's something that I could do asynchronously, sort of as and when I had time. And because I don't use social media generally, because I have RSI, which means I have to really, really think about what I do with my hands to not aggravate it. So I don't do a lot of scrolling on my ([Time 0:03:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bd792b76-3117-45dd-9e20-3bc5c806c410)) - Here are five quotes from the podcast episode that I think are particularly insightful: > I'm just one of those people who needs to be asked to do things. It doesn't necessarily always occur to me to like, oh, so I put myself into those spaces. > > — **Alice Sowerby** > Our goal is to make our community members sound as fabulous as possible. So we're not trying to trick people into saying something they shouldn't have said. We want everybody to be comfortable with the outcome of the podcast. > > — **Dawn Foster** > The most difficult aspect of it is getting somebody to talk on it. So getting a speaker, getting the right person, and not just getting the right person. Is the person free to about talk it? Is the person chance to be on the session, right? > > — **Harmony Elendu** > It's really easy to just keep tapping those same people over and over and over. And I think that gets really boring for people. So that was a challenge when I was doing it. > > — **Dawn Foster** > If people would like to help us with the podcast, what can they do to help? Suggest topics for us. We would want to know what you think. We'd want you to decide on the things that you want us to talk about because we know that listening is already a very, very huge thing that you're doing for us. > > — **Harmony Elendu** Transcript: Alice Sowerby I thought, wow, I think she'd be really great for the podcast. And now here she is. I was very honored to be asked. I think I'm just one of those people who needs to be asked to do things. It doesn't necessarily always occur to me to like, oh, so I put myself into those spaces. It was really nice to be asked. And it's something that I could do asynchronously, sort of as and when I had time. And because I don't use social media generally, because I have RSI, which means I have to really, really think about what I do with my hands to not aggravate it. So I don't do a lot of scrolling on my phone, which means I don't use social media, which means that if I want to be visible, just means not reading and posting on social media a lot. So I thought, actually, podcast, it's all talking. So why not do that? But Dawn gave me a couple of training sessions on how to use some of the tools and adopt the processes. There's actually quite a lot of moving parts for the podcast, more than you might think. And I'm just trying to think, what point did I get to where I thought we should have another person doing this? It might have been when I was, well, you tell me Harmony, was I asking just about Chaos Africa? Like, can we get someone from Chaos Africa to help? Or did I make a general request? Because I cannot actually remember how you ended up coming aboard. Harmony Elendu It was actually a general request. So that day I was less busy. I love like giving like a helping hand in the chaos community. So I just popped up on Slack and I was like, who could help do this and do some stuff? And I was like, yeah, let me just help out. And without the background, Chaos Cast is like my first podcast recording. It's my first, everything that has to do is producing a session on podcasts, right? So Alice was helpful. She brought me in. She had a couple of training sections, and she told me, is that a program we'd love to do? And I was like, yes, let's hear about the experiences. We came about a program called 20 Minutes of Chaos Africa, where we got contributors to come and tell us how we're doing in the community. Basically inspire new folks with their own experiences and how they got to know about chaos amongst other stuff yeah so it's been exciting i met alice through slack in the community And so much fun i met amazing people we have talked about various products and i'm happy to have co-produced over five podcasts. I think it's almost 10, but maybe over five podcasts. Been exciting. Alice Sowerby Yeah, I really enjoyed working with you, Harmony, and getting to know you. And actually, I've seen like you've really grown into doing this podcast stuff, particularly the hosting. Dawn Foster I really like listening to the way you host the podcasts. Harmony Elendu Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dawn Foster I've really liked a couple of those Chaos Africa podcasts. It was just so interesting to hear people's stories about how they got involved in chaos and how they've used what they learned in chaos to contribute to other communities. And it was just really interesting because these are people that I kind of work with in the community, but didn't know that much about. And so some of those podcasts are really interesting. Harmony Elendu Thank you so much, Tan. We'll do more of it, actually. We'll have more sections coming up. Alice Sowerby Let's talk a little bit about then what it takes to produce the Chaos podcast and what are the activities. Now, I wonder if Harmony, as the newer person, is probably a bit fresher in your mind. Do you want to take a start on that? Harmony Elendu So producing the podcast starts from deliberating on the topic. Sometimes we have to record this session before deciding on the topic. But it starts from like, what can we talk about? What's trending in the society? What needs more attention or things for people to talk about? How would this topic better off the next person or the audience listening to it? At least that's for me. That's what I think before deciding on the topic. Sometimes it could be something I've been prodding on, maybe in open source. I've been thinking of how this works and how folks get to get around it and how people work towards this particular stuff like licensing. And I'll be like, okay, we could talk about this and we'll get people that are experts in these areas or have like a great knowledge and they would come on the panel and talk about it so that People like me that have less knowledge understands or know how this function in the open source community will be able to get an insight and understand it in detail. So the first thing is deciding on the topic or deciding on something to talk about. And the most difficult aspect of it is getting somebody to talk on it. So getting a speaker, getting the right person, and not just getting the right person. Is the person free to talk about it? Is the person chance to be on the session, right? So it's very, very not smooth, but it's exciting because of the whole experience, reaching out, thinking about stuff and lots more really. Thanks. Alice Sowerby So Harmony and I collaborate every week. We have a standing call. We have a spreadsheet and anyone that works with me knows that I run my work out of spreadsheets. And we have all the dates that we want to release the podcast. So we have every second Thursday, we aim to release a podcast. So we're working with podcasts in different state of production. So some of them are just in ideation and those are the ones further out into the future. And we have a list of ideas that people have given us or that we've brainstormed together. And those are sort of being turned into episodes and that are further ahead. Then we would have podcasts that are currently being arranged. So like Harmony says, we're looking for guests, we're sending out doodle polls, we're trying to set up a recording, and then we set up an episode document which has all the talking points In it. And the guests, if they're new people to the podcast, they'll give us information about them so that we can set up a profile for them. We record on Zoom. We have a company called Peachtree Sound who edits the podcast for us so that any sloughs or little gaps and things or mistakes are taken out. And they add the intro and the outro and the music and all that sort of thing. And then we use a tool called Fireside for hosting. And that's provided to us by Sustain. Is that right, Dawn? Yeah, absolutely. Hi, Sustain. Thank you for your support. Actually, in the previous podcast, episode 100, we do talk a little bit more about all the people that financially support because the editing is paid for as well out of donations, essentially. So then we schedule it in Fireside and we have to create any new guest profiles in Fireside. We ha... ([Time 0:03:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/45eef89e-75c5-4b23-9d93-e870de7663d9)) - **Harmony Joins** - Harmony Elendu joined CHAOSScast after responding to a general request for help on Slack. - He co-created the "20 Minutes of CHAOSS Africa" segment, his first podcasting experience. Transcript: Alice Sowerby We should have another person doing this? It might have been when I was, well, you tell me Harmony, was I asking just about Chaos Africa? Like, can we get someone from Chaos Africa to help? Or did I make a general request? Because I cannot actually remember how you ended up coming aboard. Harmony Elendu It was actually a general request. So that day I was less busy. I love like giving like a helping hand in the chaos community. So I just popped up on Slack and I was like, who could help do this and do some stuff? And I was like, yeah, let me just help out. And without the background, Chaos Cast is like my first podcast recording. It's my first, everything that has to do is producing a session on podcasts, right? So Alice was helpful. She brought me in. She had a couple of training sections, and she told me, is that a program we'd love to do? And I was like, yes, let's hear about the experiences. We came about a program called 20 Minutes of Chaos Africa, where we got contributors to come and tell us how we're doing in the community. Basically inspire new folks with their own experiences and how they got to know about chaos amongst other stuff yeah so it's been exciting i met alice through slack in the community And so much fun i met amazing people we have talked about various products and i'm happy to have co-produced over five podcasts. I think it's almost 10, but maybe over five ([Time 0:04:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/078db937-76b0-43f2-878d-fc5f362e170f)) - **Podcast Production Process** - Start podcast production by brainstorming topics relevant to the community. - Use collaborative tools, like spreadsheets, for managing production tasks and schedules. Transcript: Harmony Elendu Have more sections coming up. Alice Sowerby Let's talk a little bit about then what it takes to produce the Chaos podcast and what are the activities. Now, I wonder if Harmony, as the newer person, is probably a bit fresher in your mind. Do you want to take a start on that? Harmony Elendu So producing the podcast starts from deliberating on the topic. Sometimes we have to record this session before deciding on the topic. But it starts from like, what can we talk about? What's trending in the society? What needs more attention or things for people to talk about? How would this topic better off the next person or the audience listening to it? At least that's for me. That's what I think before deciding on the topic. Sometimes it could be something I've been prodding on, maybe in open source. I've been thinking of how this works and how folks get to get around it and how people work towards this particular stuff like licensing. And I'll be like, okay, we could talk about this and we'll get people that are experts in these areas or have like a great knowledge and they would come on the panel and talk about it so that People like me that have less knowledge understands or know how this function in the open source community will be able to get an insight and understand it in detail. So the first thing is deciding on the topic or deciding on something to talk about. And the most difficult aspect of it is getting somebody to talk on it. So getting a speaker, getting the right person, and not just getting the right person. Is the person free to talk about it? Is the person chance to be on the session, right? So it's very, very not smooth, but it's exciting because of the whole experience, reaching out, thinking about stuff and lots more really. Thanks. Alice Sowerby So Harmony and I collaborate every week. We have a standing call. We have a spreadsheet and anyone that works with me knows that I run my work out of spreadsheets. And we have all the dates that we want to release the podcast. So we have every second Thursday, we aim to release a podcast. So we're working with podcasts in different state of production. So some of them are just in ideation and those are the ones further out into the future. And we have a list of ideas that people have given us or that we've brainstormed together. And those are sort of being turned into episodes and that are further ahead. Then we would have podcasts that are currently being arranged. So like Harmony says, we're looking for guests, we're sending out doodle polls, we're trying to set up a recording, and then we set up an episode document which has all the talking points In it. And the guests, if they're new people to the podcast, they'll give us information about them so that we can set up a profile for them. We record on Zoom. We have a company called Peachtree Sound who edits the podcast for us so that any sloughs or little gaps and things or mistakes are taken out. And they add the intro and the outro and the music and all that sort of thing. And then we use a tool called Fireside for hosting. And that's provided to us by Sustain. Is that right, Dawn? Yeah, absolutely. ([Time 0:07:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c6f8d9f9-be03-471d-b9b3-e16b9cac9b77)) - **Community Podcast Approach** - Community podcasts prioritize making members sound good and comfortable. - They edit content based on participant feedback, fostering a friendly, open environment. Transcript: Dawn Foster I think that's one of the things that's important about a podcast like this one is that the people running it have to have the tools that work best for them. So for me, having it as a GitHub issue was kind of nice for me. But yeah, I'm in favor of scrapping things like that if people prefer spreadsheets and other things. Just to add one more thing about the editing. So this is one of the things that's different about a community podcast. So I've done maybe four or five different podcasts over the years that I've hosted and run. And running a community podcast is different for a lot of people than being interviewed for like a media podcast, because our goal is to make our community members sound as fabulous As possible. So we're not trying to trick people into saying something they shouldn't have said. We want everybody to be comfortable with the outcome of the podcast. So that's one of the things that I really love about Chaos Cast and about doing community podcasts in general, is that we can just be really friendly and open. We edit anything out that anybody wants to edit out. And like Alice mentioned, if somebody wants to review it before it goes public, we're happy to let them do that. So our process is a lot more community oriented than what people might expect. ([Time 0:11:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7296d815-9061-4326-9747-681521f09cca)) - **Choosing Topics** - Generate podcast topics by brainstorming, audience suggestions, and community needs. - Email [email protected] to suggest topics or guests for discussion. Transcript: Harmony Elendu The way we choose our topics is very exciting and community oriented. It's more or less, we have a meeting where the audience and anybody that have access to this email, email is podcasts at chaos.community, where if you feel like we should talk about something Or any topic, anyone, you could just send us an email or just bing anyone that hosted before, and we'll get that topic out and talk about it. And the other method is thinking about it. We have suggestions of topics that we could talk about. We also have who are people or training topics or things that we feel like that need more deliberation, more breakdown so that people in open source and beyond open source could understand What's going on and stuff. And basically it's mostly about how community health is evaluated, how the metrics are being built and a couple of other stuff. So there's a lot we do in choosing topics. But the thing you should take note is that there's no straightforward pathway. It's just no rule that is set aside in the topic. There are just guidelines and ways we just produce the topics and the right things to just talk about. ([Time 0:12:58](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b7273c72-fa8c-4d28-a579-9e37aac2847a)) - **Guest Diversity** - Look for diverse guests beyond the usual suspects. - Feature new voices and perspectives to keep the podcast engaging and avoid repetition. Transcript: Alice Sowerby Yeah. Dawn Foster And one of the things that was always a bit of a challenge for me was finding new guests, because there are a lot of people who are sort of like go-to for things in chaos, people who've been Around the community for a long time. So people like Sean Goggins and Matt German Prey and Elizabeth Barron and Georg Link. And so it's really easy to just keep tapping those same people over and over and over. And I think that gets really boring for people. I think one of the challenges is trying to think of new people who are doing interesting things that we could get on the podcast and go beyond sort of the traditional host list or guest List for the podcast. So that was a challenge when I was doing it. ([Time 0:16:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/514a0fa4-d089-4c99-9fd3-d25fc391d03f)) - **Scheduling Challenges** - Scheduling podcasts is challenging, especially across time zones. - Factor in guest availability, company approvals, and potential delays when planning. Transcript: Harmony Elendu Would actually like something of that nature because getting people to speak is actually very difficult. But the next thing that's quite a very huge challenge is figuring out a time that works for everybody. I think that's a very, very huge challenge when it comes to recording, getting a time because one thing is getting the guests. The other thing is getting the time that works for everybody because you need to get everybody together for at least an hour for that recording on the topic that you guys are going to record About or something. So getting them together for that time, especially with the time zone differences and some persons or some guests needs a couple of approvers and stuff like that. So getting them together is a very big, huge hassle. And thank God it usually works out over time. As ([Time 0:17:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c136bd63-1960-4172-879e-7debfb3afa03)) - **Help the Podcast** - Suggest topics, guests, or provide feedback via [email protected]. - Share episodes and promote CHAOSScast to expand its reach. Transcript: Alice Sowerby If people would like to help us with the podcast, what can they do to help? Harmony Elendu I think the first thing is suggesting topics for us. We would want to know what you think. We'd want you to decide on the things that you want us to talk about because we know that listening is already a very, very huge thing that you're doing for us. Listening to the voices, listening to things that we talk about. So we want you to also have a voice in what we record. So suggest as much topics as you can. And if you feel like you want somebody on the podcast or a guest, do well to also mention the person then. We will take the challenge to reach out to the person, ensuring that you have them or you listen to their voice on ChaosCast. So just always suggest a topic. You don't have to shy, just email us. And the good thing is that we don't have to mention your name, that the topic is coming from you. So just send the topic, ([Time 0:20:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/62f177b4-0929-4966-9a76-6c9109dc4af8))