Episode: 2255
Title: HPR2255: The Good Ship HPR
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2255/hpr2255.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 00:28:52

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This is HBR episode 2,255 entitled The Good Ship HBR.
It is hosted by Dave Morris and is about 26 minutes long and carries an exquisite flag.
The summary is, HBR is a wonderful yet fragile project completely dependent on a steady flow
on shows from hosts.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
At 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15, that's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hello everybody, this is Dave Morris and welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
HBR is the subject of today's episode.
I've called it The Good Ship HBR and the reason why will become apparent as I continue.
In case you don't really know much about HBR perhaps you just picked this episode up
and wondering what it's all about.
I thought I'd start by introducing it a little bit, you might not know all the ins and outs.
So what is it? It's a pretty amazing thing actually.
I've known it for a number of years now but it was quite astonished when I found it.
It's been producing one episode a day every week day for quite some time and all the episodes
that year on HBR originate from the community. I had somebody refer to HBR as crowd sourced
which I thought was a pretty nice idea. Nice way of putting it because it is.
The community of listeners has listeners and others actually has sort of transformed into people
who've contributed shows and that host community continues to grow and to produce shows.
And the shows are open access. They're under creative commons and licenses of various sorts.
CCBISA is the default. The content is very broad. It says that content is all of interest to hackers
but well first you have to define what a hacker is and then you have to define all of interest
and that leaves you with a lot of possibilities. A lot of people have interpreted it in a wide
variety of ways. So you can get to all the shows through the HBR site. You can go all the way back
to episode one and there you can see the whatever notes there are and read them and you can play
the show. There are also feeds that you can download stuff to a podcast or pod catcher and you can
get shows. You can also get stuff by series by the comments that people submit to shows. You can
also follow email through feed. We're in the process of uploading things to archive.org.
At the moment within a few days of appearing on the feed, the main feed that is shows are uploaded
and we're gradually working backwards through the older shows and uploading them. So what we
want to achieve is to have everything on archive.org. So if you want to look up show 1999 for example
on archive.org, I've put the URL of what you would need but it basically ends with HPR1999.
And you can also browse the entire HPR collection that's been uploaded and you can search it too
on archive.org. We can't do searching very much on the HPR site but it's something we're working on.
So I thought it was worth just mentioning some of the history of HPR other than what I've already
said is which is quite general. There's a website stats page which is not very, not a very
friendly page but it does give you information about what's happening on HPR and when it was
created and that sort of stuff. So HPR itself was actually came into being as HPR nine years ago
but it was preceded by today with the techie 11 years ago. You can see the actual dates and so forth
in the file. I've put them in the notes as well and there's long notes which I've added to this so
that you can read the contents of essentially what I'm saying. I'm not reading them out to you. I'm
just sort of ad-libbing off them but you'll get the general just so you can read it again if you want
to rather than listen to me. I've also produced them as a EPUB version. A ChoZEPUB because I find it
more usable. It didn't bother with PDF. So the frequency of show release wasn't what we have now
five per week every weekday. There were gaps and sometimes there were quite long gaps and occasionally
there were shows coming out the weekend in the early day but I did a little scan through the database
to see where the gaps occurred and there were quite a number of them but I didn't do a complex analysis
of them and I should say I would have liked it but stability of five shows a week every weekday
happened in October 2012 and there have been no gaps in thin which I think is quite significant.
It's a very important feature. It is something you can rely on and it's something we want to
maintain is the reliability of HBR's show release cycle is something that really I think should
continue and that's one of its selling points I think. So there are currently 280 people hosts as
we say who have contributed shows throughout the history of HBR and just now in February 2017
show number 2230 has been released which is pretty impressive. That's a lot of shows. We will
incorporate the today with a techie shows and hosts into the into the system and the archive
in due course. So HBR has been pretty good. It's been very successful over the years however there's
a certain fragility in the way that it works and that's the reason for for doing this episode.
So let's look at that. What's the fragility? What's the problem? Well the big gotcha is that HBR
needs a steady supply of contributions to keep doing that thing of releasing one show every weekday
and sometimes the supply nearly dries up. So HBR needs five shows a week, 52 weeks. That's
260. It's not precisely that number but it's around that area depending on the number of days in
year and where they align and so forth. I did say here that given that we've got 280 people registered
there if all of them provided a show per year, one show per year we'd be fine we would have no
problems with shortages but the rate of supply is not reliable unfortunately. Sometimes there are
plenty of shows in the queue at this precise moment there are plenty but at other times the
supply dwindles and the future HBR looks very much in doubt and that future I think it needs to
be said the future of HBR in terms of reliability of producing a show per day every weekday.
We do keep a small buffer of emergency shows which are there in case there's a gap in the
schedule 24 hours prior to release so if the next next day has not yet been filled the next slot
then we would use one of the emergency shows there's only eight in that queue we don't
want to have too many anyway because they they need to be special in that they they sit around
for a long time so they need to be timeless in some form. There's been debate over whether we
should even be keeping it an emergency collection at all. At the moment the decision has been yes
so we are. So I started thinking about this well actually in 2015 I started thinking about this
it's another show that has taken me an enormous length of time to get to and get done but when I was
planning doing this planning for this in reality actually writing stuff HBR just been through
quite a crisis in terms of the supply of shows there were just a few left and it was about to run out
we put out emergency appeals for for shows and people stepped up and provided showed as a consequence
it was really good to see but then things went quiet and the state of shortage started to loom again
it didn't become quite as severe but it took another appeal on one of the monthly community
new shows to to restart the flow then another shortage occurred in August 2016 and so it went on
and this is how it does go on you only need to look at the calendar page I've linked to it where we
keep a diagram a plot of the peaks and troughs in supply and you'll see it's a sawtooth. HBR is an
example of what tended to be called community internet radio it's not radio at all really because
it's narrow casting rather than broadcasting but that was the term that was around nine years or
so ago and it's still a useful thing to refer to but in particular the way that things are for HBR
is that we see a feast of shows followed by a famine followed by a feast and so on and so forth
now the reason that the goodship HBR idea came up was in a recent conversation about the problem
I likened our situation to being in a leaky ship the ship is always in danger of sinking unless
we keep emptying the water out by Bailey there are at least 280 crew members who have buckets and
can help with emptying the water but there's also there are also many more passengers who could
grab a bucket and join in so everyone needs to take a turn it's not reasonable to expect just a
few crew members to keep the ship from sinking beneath the way so there is a certain need for
the listeners and existing hosts to step up and provide more shows for HBR so I reiterate here the
the fact that we had this rather desperate situation run about the 12th of April 2016 and we had to
go into emergency mode to put out requests for more shows we had people stepping up to help and that
was that was wonderful but it's not really the the way we wanted it but it's not the way to run
using the ship analogy again you can't get the point where the water is washing over the decks
before we start bailing it needs to be a constant process I thought it would be useful to look at
some of the statistics that I collected yeah today today I put today's date in the in the
the notes I'm not going to go into a lot of detail there because it gets quite tedious and I've
made some table see that you can look at so in the last I've computed the number of hosts in the
last 12 months and the there have been 67 hosts not all new that have contributed to the 260 shows
that have been needed in that period so 67 people have contributed shows in the last 12 months
but in that in that period we also had 22 new hosts and they've done their first show in it and
in several cases have gone on to contribute more totaling 56 shows in total between them so I've
got a table that shows the number of people contributing greater than 10 shows between five and 10
shows and less than five shows over that year period and the number of shows each group has
produced as a consequence and what percentage that represents in relation to the need for shows
over that period so just to skim through it quickly five people did over 10 episodes in the last
year producing 87 episodes which is 33% of the requirement there were 10 people contributed
between five and 10 shows and that produced 73 episodes which is 28% the remaining 100
shows came from people who were contributing one show and less than five show obviously one show
why did I say that and so there were 52 people who did that 100 shows that was 38% of the of the need
the requirement for that period I made some other analyses of things going on I showed the number
of new hosts arriving joining within calendar years remember that HPR was begun in 2007
31st of December in fact so there was only one day for it in 2007 so we had one new host in that
that time it was our founder stankdog and then after that there have been different numbers of hosts
joining per year obviously 2017 we're only into February so far so we've only got two hosts
today but in other times we've got a various numbers 47 in 2008 we've got 2016 had 22 I'll
leave you to look at that it just gives some idea of the the rate or at which people are joining
and contributing shows at least contributing their first show so how do we solve this shortage problem
this this issue has been kicked around a little bit but I thought it was useful just to
trying to collate things together and have a further brainstorm about how to to deal with it
there aren't any simple solutions obviously people are contributing episodes and the HPR project
is still going but it's the steady state that we want and we're not getting and we recognize this
problem for as long as HPR has been around I guess nobody's really found a solution I've got a few
thoughts and comments here to try and raise awareness and get suggestions from the community
thought I better start with some assumptions and caveats thinking about this I keep on falling
into ways of thinking which are not quite right and I thought it's worth just spelling these out
spelling out the things that you need to have clear in your mind there is an attrition process
amongst contributors so there's a proportion of the host population that have done one show
and then never been seen again others have done maybe more than one up to quite some several
and then effectively disappear I won't name any names but I could do obviously because I had to
analyse the show release dates and hosts in order to come up with this sort of stuff so the fact
that there is an attrition process means that we do need to be recruiting new hosts and
but HPR continues to function because of repeated contribution from people so we can't just function
on the basis that we want new hosts and a new host by definition brings with them a show but we
need there to be more than that one so encouraging existing hosts to continue contributing shows
is one of the things that we need to do in order to continue and solve for shortage HPR needs listeners
and it needs to have a reasonably high visibility and but in terms of the supply of episodes
contributors are more important than listeners though ideally said all listeners if all listeners
were contributors that would be wonderful one thing that hadn't quite occurred to me until recently
is that not all contributors necessarily listened to HPR some people might have heard of it
in passing and want to produce a show they might use it as a springboard to doing something else
doing a podcast of their own or something like that or they might just like the HPR concept and
want to make their own mark by producing a podcast I mean there is something quite nice but being
able to say that you have produced a podcast a show an episode of your own and it can be heard
in perpetuity on HPR and on archive.org so my next topic was raising the profile of HPR and this
was really following on from what a show that Drupes did 2035 he did a show I think the argument is
the more HPR is known about the more listeners they'll be the more listeners there are the more host
there are likely to be though listeners and hosts don't don't correlate necessarily not everybody
you he listens wants to contribute and the more hosts we get the more new hosts we get the more
shows there will be was one of the the think one of the pieces of thinking here though that's not
as clear as you might think as I've already said so just to skim through the points that Drupes made
he was suggesting that we transcribe shows so there was a written written notes that's a huge
task it's a massive task I can't honestly see how we can achieve that it's it's more than more
than I could take on and I suspect there won't be many people who would want to to get involved
with that I can't think of an automated way of doing it he suggested we get well-known podcasters
to guest hosts or advertise advertising I think it'd be a great thing we need more more advertising
but not sure about the other interview more people definitely definitely because they'll
mention the interview on their blog or social media we're seeing that now with with Ken's stuff
from Fosdem for example offer a phone app to simplify the recording and submission of shows
definitely collect more topics through a survey or submission form yep generate host photos with
show titles for social media we're doing some of that make a video explaining what HBR is yeah
sounds good and comments on the tags thing well I've already said that the tags were working on tags
and I've got a couple of three shows eventually coming up about this not sure where this show
will come out in relation to them but it's a it's an ongoing topic anyway so we need more shows
about cool software books or documentaries says Drupes and an HBR shop with stickers t-shirts and
tote bags yeah it's an interesting idea I'm not sure it take some of them take us into realms that
we're going to be very hard to to sustain that suspect but not want to call a poor cold war
drone so I wanted to comment on the need for for new hosts and I sampled the HBR database again
and found that quite a number of registered hosts in the period up to the end of 2015 contributed one
show and never seen again and I found there were 87 people who had become a host done the one show
and then I'd gone so that was around 31% of the host count contributed to their one show before
the start of 2016 so that was just really making the point we need a constant stream of new hosts
we need to have some means of attracting potential new hosts to make it contribution
in people are often impressed by the HBR idea and but going from there to producing a show of
the Romans it's not necessarily doesn't necessarily follow perhaps there's mileage in someone doing
a show or video about breaking down the barriers for new hosts I've been to a number of conferences
and things like our camp and stuff and people where we have a table and people come and talk to us
about who we are and what we're doing and stuff like the idea of of HBR but when the thought of
actually doing a show themselves comes up they say well what would I talk about and then they say
why would I have the stuff that that that I need to do it you know there's this kind
there's thinking they need to be ultra technical and that they need to have a studio or something
and there's a comment I feel stupid recording myself or I hate this animal voice
these are sort of some of the barriers that need to be overcome in getting new people to come
and join in simplifying the submission process would be a good thing it's already quite streamlined
compared to what it was but the idea that Drup suggests to making a phone up is very good I think
anyway I wonder if there's anybody in the community who could do such a thing and maybe something
like a a YouTube video or something like that explaining how you become a host could be could be
could help to get people in the even though it's a lot more streamlined than it was it still
seems to confuse people to some degree one of the factors is the need for more than one show from a
host so I wanted to comment on the incentive to do show number two and and further shows I think
it's really important to give feedback on shows I've wondered how valued contributors feel especially
after the first show and to what extent lack of feedback in the past has dissuaded people from
doing more shows I can envisage a case where somebody's thinking I did a show for HBR and I thought
it might be interesting but nobody's said anything about it I don't know if I'll bother to do
another one I don't know I have no evidence for that but it just struck me as a possibility when
I first heard HBR I enjoyed the community news shows and was impressed the way that it reviewed
the the previous months episodes I think it's a really important part of HBR and it's
something that does give feedback in lieu of comments or others other sorts of feedback so it
and the comments are really important I believe I've wondered if perhaps a like button would improve
things the way of giving feedback and could help with encouragement the trouble is that this would
not be trivial to implement especially in us if we want to keep the the website and so forth
and the code that drives it as simple as possible what is an HBR show anyway that's something that
needs to be considered the range of stuff that's already been submitted is very broad but maybe
people get the impression that HBR is all about highly technical topics scripting programming and
that sort of thing and that's an element but we've had very broad range of stuff as I've said
I'm reminded of an episode on swimming in a wild swimming in river in France
cooking of various sorts making coffee mental health building a bicycle we've had a lot
interest the term interest to hackers means interest to hobbyists and makers as well so it's
it's really broad the description is so wide that there's hardly anything that's not acceptable
and perhaps we should make more of explaining this to people so should we be advertising HBR
and should we be saying to people to who are potential hosts that here is a platform for them
to come and talk about their particular interests and everybody has interests of various sorts
maybe they don't fully appreciate that there's an audience potential audience out there who
would listen to them talking about maybe the family abort when they're talking about it but
I suspect that there are people on HBR who would enjoy enjoy whatever it is so I did
been thinking more about statistics since I've been digging around in the database in the past
week or two and I think it would be quite interesting to maintain a page of statistics about
the number of hosts and shows and so forth just not necessarily going into detail but just to
give people a existing hosts and potential contributors an indication of what's happening
and how there's a constant need for shows and I've linked back to the statistics I've produced
earlier on in these notes as maybe an example of what could be displayed I did have a few thoughts
about perhaps doing things around things a bit more competitive around this around statistics
I mean should we be displaying details about the longest show in the last year or the last month
the shortest show the host of the show with the most comments the host with the most shows in the
last month or a year should we be doing something like that it would be possible I've done it myself
to be honest just to see but I don't know I'm not personally that keen on that that sort of thing
I think it might be more discouraging than anything else when I'm interested in what people have
to say about it and the last thing I was going to say was a really absurd one should we send out
begging letters should we be doing something like dear ex HBI is constantly in need of shows you have
been a contributor in the past but we've not heard from you for a long time perhaps you could
record another show for us would be very helpful to the survival of the project do we do something
like that I I noted here I get stuff like this from various various sources from schools my
children have been to in the past from universities I've been to etc etc effectively well they're
looking for money rather than than shows or anything that sort but there's something about that
that says oh thank you very much for your contribution oh now you're a victim I'm going to
keep hassling you forever now which really bothers me so I think my vote would be against but
I thought I'd throw it out there just to see if anybody had any any comments about it okay so we
we've looked at this concept of the good ship HBR and the fact that it's a leaky ship and
could sink at any time I've offered some thoughts some mind some not and obviously have no absolute
answers but I'd be very very interested to get we all would be interested to get more comments
and contributions to how we solve the problem of continuing the HBR model and ensuring that we get
a more steady stream of contributions to it okay that's it for now then bye bye
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