hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2582.txt

Episode: 2582
Title: HPR2582: 3 Contribution case studies
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2582/hpr2582.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 06:06:54

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This is an HPR episode 2005-182 entitled, Re-contribution Case Study.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 45 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is how easy it is for your potential contributor to contribute.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
www.klaatu.org
www.klaatu.org
Hey everyone, this is Klaatu.
You're listening to HackTravel Radio.
In this episode, I want to talk about contribution.
Contribution is an important topic, assuming you're into, and if you're listening to HPR, you probably are.
But assuming you're into open projects, whether that's open source or free culture,
or whatever, anything that is inviting other people from outside of yourself to take part in the creation of something,
whether it's something in the physical world or a software project or whatever.
I think any project of whatever nature it may be has to step back at some point and look at it's in the way that it's inviting people in to contribute.
We have to do that because you set something up and you're probably not at first thinking of contribution from outside.
Because when you're setting it up, you're probably, you believe that you're at critical mass already.
That's why you felt okay about setting something up.
You don't generally tend to set a project up with no one else on board.
Or if you are the only person on board, then you think, well, I'm good enough.
I'm pretty much what I need.
So I will create this project.
And maybe in the back of your mind, you're thinking, golly, I hope someone comes along.
But you're probably not constructing that entry point yet because it's not needed yet.
And that early in the project, what gets built is what's really, really important.
And usually a nice invite to, hey, everybody join me, is not the thing that you start at.
You start at the project that you want people to be attracted to.
You want to have something so that when they do come to you, you have some good stuff.
You have enough there that they think, yeah, I could actually help finish that off for you.
So let's work together on this rather than spending a bunch of time inviting people into your project.
And then when they get in, there's nothing there. It's a big empty space.
So that's something that we tend to ignore initially with, I think, good reason.
I think that's a fair, I think it's a pretty good workflow.
I'm not saying that I wouldn't be fascinated to hear different theories on that.
But I can't say that I blame a project for not having that super friendly, invitational storefront before they start working on the interior.
I want to look at three different projects very specifically and kind of analyze how they invite people from outside to contribute, to come in, to join.
The first project I want to look at, and actually, so hacker public radio, by the way, is not one of the projects I'm going to look at, which may surprise you.
And I'm doing this specifically because hacker public radio, while it is a, I think, a marvelous example of successful contributor driven content.
I mean, we are entirely, we're all just contributors, right?
We all somehow heard about hacker public radio and we contribute to it.
Or you consume it, maybe you're not a contributor.
Whatever your relationship with it, you're part of hacker public radio.
And I think it's amazing that hacker public radio has been around for as long as it has, and has somehow survived off of the off chance of people finding out about hacker public radio and contributing enough content for it to have a show every single day of the week for, however many years we've been going.
But I'm not going to talk about hacker public radio because I feel like I am, I am dangerously close to hacker public radio in order, in order to be able to use it effectively as a case study to be honest.
I think it would be interesting for someone else who's maybe newer to hacker public radio to critique what we have going on.
But me, myself, I've been here since I think episode 76.
So I've seen the submission, the contribution model go through several different iterations, and I have complaints and praises about different times in hacker public radios, contribution framework.
And so for me to try to use it as an example or a case study, I feel I would do a really poor job.
I would get bogged down in a lot of the minutiae that maybe just doesn't even matter anymore, maybe it wouldn't apply because that's not what we're doing now.
So I'm ignoring hacker public radio interestingly.
But of course everything that I'm talking about maybe you could apply to hacker public radio, who knows.
So the three projects I'm going to look at first, the first one I'm going to look at is Slackware.
So Slackware, I wouldn't say that I was heavily involved in Slackware.
Actually, I would. I would say I was heavily involved with Slackware, but I'm certainly not behind the scenes on Slackware.
I am not part of the Slackware team that builds Slackware in other words.
I am a member of the team that supports Slackware in several different ways.
And I mean, you don't get a badge for being a team for being a supporter of Slackware.
So there is no sign-up project. And I think that exemplifies, I'm talking specifically about Slackware, but I think that this is actually a very broad thing within the open source and free culture community.
The lack of an official t-shirt, well actually, Slackware has t-shirts, but the lack of a like a so-on patch for your jacket or a membership like a bracelet to get you into the club.
The lack of something sort of tangible, even when it might not be physical tangible, but something that you can really point to and say, when I get that, then I am a part of this community or this project or whatever.
That is really tough. And I think it's just human nature to sort of waffle as it were between saying, well yes, I am a part of this thing.
I mean, I don't want to be presumptuous. I mean, I'm not like a big deal. I'm just a part of this thing.
But if you get the badge, then you know exactly what you can say. You can say, well look, I've got this badge and I've sewn it onto my scout sash or my scout shirt or whatever they put their badges on.
And that means that I am this component in this bigger structure. So Slackware does not have that. And I think a lot of open projects just don't have it.
It's just one of those things where if you show up and you do some stuff, then if you want to say you're a part of the project, go for it. If you don't want to identify with the project, that's okay too.
And that's very unsettling to some people who, you know, if you're hearing the people bang on the drum about, hey, you should contribute to open source or contribute to free culture or whatever.
And you think, okay, well, where do I sign up and only to find that there is no sign-up sheet? That can be a little bit frightening and a little bit disorienting.
So going back specifically to Slackware just to get myself grounded in experience.
Slackware certainly there's no official channel for any kind of contribution. You can email the lead maintainer of Slackware and make suggestions.
You may not ever hear back from this person. You can go to linuxquestions.org and post in a forum. The Slackware official forum is there.
So you can post into that forum and you may or may not hear back from a maintainer who has some official capacity for what ends up on that Slackware DVD.
But it's all very kind of you're just shooting in the dark, you know? I mean, not exactly because you know exactly where your target is.
It's just whether or not you are actually being considered, you're not necessarily going to get a status report on whatever ticket you have filed, whether it's a bug ticket or a feature request.
You're not necessarily going to hear too much about that. And again, that's a little bit disconcerting and it almost might feel a little bit unfriendly.
Although in practice, from what I've found, it kind of works. It tends to sort itself out. Like if it's something that absolutely needs an answer, you generally get one.
And if it's something that maybe is being considered, maybe it will be done. Then maybe you don't get a question yet because there's an answer yet because it's still being considered.
And then one day it just pops up in the change log and you realize, oh, they took the suggestion and implemented it.
Cool. That's happened to me twice now. And it's a little bit unsteady because you don't get that constant feedback.
So for a new contributor, I guess I would classify that as not friendly. I wouldn't say that it was unfriendly. I guess I would just say it was neutral.
It is something that is clearly open to suggestions, but it's not going to actively seek them out. And it's not going to encourage you the first time that you that you contact them.
It's just it is there if you choose to contact them. Then that is what you've done.
Now related to Slackware, and this doesn't count as another study case study. This is the same thing still.
So related to Slackware is the official, the official extras repository of Slackware is called the SlackBuilds.org.
And this is run by a different set of people than then Slackware is being built by. But it has gained official status.
I mean, it's been recognized officially by Slackware as sort of the extras repository. You know, whatever you call that, the multiverse or the universe or whatever you might think of it as.
It's not within the building, but it's within the it's in the same neighborhood. So this has a very clear path towards contribution.
If you sit down and say I want to maintain a Slackware package, like that is my goal.
Well, you're not going to be able to maintain a Slackware package because all Slackware packages are maintained by one team,
all sensibly by one person, but in practice by one team. So the next best thing is well, I'm going to maintain, I'm going to become a SlackBuilds maintainer.
I'm going to maintain something in the repository, the extras repository of Slackware, SlackBuilds.org.
And you can do that. You go to SlackBuilds.org. There is a very clear path towards submission and there's a very clear rule set of what your submission should look like.
There are templates for what your submission, for you to structure your submission around. And then you submit that script and it goes into a holding area for someone to review it manually.
And then it gets accepted. There's not, I'm not going to say there's a whole lot of handholding there, like in terms of feedback. However, it is if you read and do the things that it tells you to do, then it happens.
And I will say from my very first SlackBuilds package to toward acceptance, it was very quick. Things happened very quickly. And as I built trust within that community, I got sometimes a little bit of feedback, some friendly things like, hey, you could have done this better. And here's how. And I've changed that for you, just letting you know, though, you know, little things like that, just little adjustments here and there to scripts that I had done.
And it was all very fluid. And again, I'm going to say in terms of the sense of community, I guess there's not an overwhelming sense of community. You don't feel like you've just made several new friends because you've submitted a package to SlackBuilds.org.
On the other hand, you've done something. You've done the thing that you have set out to do. You've contributed to an open project and you are now a member of that project. You can now, you know, you can make your own badge, sew it onto your own vest, and you can authentically say that you're a member of that project.
So on this spectrum of what it's like to contribute to an open project, I'm going to put Slackware sort of somewhere in the middle, maybe, where it isn't a hundred percent super inviting and friendly and handholdy, but it's solid.
It is something that you can approach, you can research, you can perform exactly as they have specified, and the contract is fulfilled. So in other words, if you keep your side of the bargain, which they spell out very clearly, they will keep their side of the bargain, which they will spell out very clearly.
And you have now joined that project. There's no fanfare, there's no badge, there's no real acknowledgement that you're a human being, but the transaction has been completed.
That's where Slackware stands, for me, in my opinion. And I'm saying this as someone who now is quite sort of experienced with Slackware, but obviously at the time when I was contributing to Slack builds, for the, you know, the first time that I contributed to Slack builds, such was not the case.
I was, I was quite new to a lot of things, I was new to Slackware, I was relatively new to Linux still. So it's not, I'm not saying this as someone who is observing, who went out and looked for something sort of middle of the road and, and analyzed it from a distance.
This is something that I have experienced and held with me for several years and have now analyzed for you. The next project is a lot larger, and it has a lot more policies and procedures in place.
I'm not going to name this project. I am just going to say that it is a pretty large distribution with lots of packages and a lot of infrastructure. And I'm not going to name the project because I feel that their contribution model is dismal at best.
So it's a big project. So first of all, I feel like if, if you as a user are approaching a big project to contribute to it, or a user or a person, whatever, and you're, you're coming to this project, whatever it may be, and it's big.
There are lots of people behind it, and in it's, and it is achieving great things, then you kind of have to assume that you are, well, you're one of the little people, right?
You are one of the mini outsiders who are coming and knocking on the door saying, hey, I want to be in on your project.
And it's not like you have to get through a vetting process, although I guess you actually do. I mean, we all do. And I've discussed this in my previous episode about trust and building trust in communities.
But aside from that, even just just looking at it as a contract, contract transaction sort of model, you're still, you are one of the many people throwing a contract or a submission or something, some contribution at this project.
And it has to handle all those things, and it has no way of knowing whether you are one of the little people who are going to throw something and then get bored and walk away ten minutes later, or if you're one of those people who are destined to someday lead the project itself.
There's really no way of telling at any stage, right? I mean, you don't even know that. You may have intentions to stick with that project for the next 20 years, but then you get busy and you have to wander away, or you get bored and you have to wander away. There's just no telling.
So that's fair and it's to be expected, but I feel like if it's a big project, you almost kind of have to expect that to occur.
You know, you just kind of know that, okay, there's a barrier to us understanding one another. The size difference is just too big.
So the project's big, you approach the project, and the first problem with this random Linux distribution, generic Linux distribution, is that maybe you go to their Wiki or their website.
And they usually, all the Linux districts these days have some kind of, I don't even know if it's just lip service or what, but there's something that says, oh, you should join us, or you should contribute.
And that sounds great, and it sounds exciting, and it sounds like, oh my gosh, there's a lot of people back there, and they're really excited for me to join them.
And it gets you excited about that distribution, and you feel like there's a bunch of people there, and they're all using it, and they're all excited about using it, and they're just looking for more people to talk to and hang out with.
And so you feel like you're joining a club or something, you know, you're going, you're finding your people at last, but they don't always really mean that.
They sometimes they just mean, oh yeah, you should join us. But yeah, yeah, totally, you should do that too.
We're not gonna, you know, like, we don't care, we were just saying you should.
So sometimes you go to these sites, and you click on the join us, or contribute, or get involved, link, and they kind of forget to do a follow through in terms of what exactly they meant by that.
When they said get involved, do they just mean, like, like, download the distribution and install it on your computer, and now you're involved, or do they mean, like, download the development stack, and fix a bunch of bugs?
Like, what did, what did, or do they mean both of those things? And then if they mean both of those things, which of the many forks in this path that is now being forged, am I supposed to take?
Now, generic Linux distribution that I've had some experience with has defined a number of these path ways. Like, they've kind of, they have delineated them actually.
If you go to their Wiki, in fact, there's a place, like, how do I get involved? And there's this, there's an effort, clear effort being made to say, well, okay, so if you want to get involved with this,
to get involved with this aspect of this generic Linux distribution, then you can, here, here are the community nooks and crannies that you should go toward so that you can get involved.
And that's great. That's a fantastic, little bit hard to find admittedly, but, you know, that maybe that's excusable, because if you, you know, if you're at a generic Linux distribution site, you may not want to, not everyone going to that site wants to get involved.
So, having it too much in the forefront, maybe would be misleading. So, so it's fine. That may be that it's a little bit difficult to find.
So, once you find the community that you are then supposed to be getting involved with, and I've tried several different vectors, understand, with this particular mysterious Linux distribution whose name I'm not going to mention.
And one of the first targets that I set my sites on was the art department, the art group, because I thought, well, I could probably like, I don't know, fulfill requests for some easy icons or something.
Like, I could do, like, rudimentary graphic work. That's within my skill set, or it's within my knowledge set anyway. I'm not going to be the one to develop a cool look and logo, because my art sensibility is a lot different than most people's.
But I can, you know, if you need someone has an order for a specific thing, I can do that if they tell me exactly what they want and leave me no creative flexibility whatsoever.
I thought, okay, I can do that. And that did appear, like, when I first sort of went after that aspect of it, that did appear, like, at the time, at least, that that was the model that they were going for.
They sort of had tasks set up, and that seemed really good. Like, here are some tasks that need to be completed. And if you are new here, you can take one of those tasks, market taken, do it, and then submit it for approval, and now you've got a task done.
And so that seemed like a really good model. And so I followed these steps. And in the end, the work was submitted, and there was just never any feedback given. Like, it was never accepted, but it was never declined. It was just, it was almost as if though it had been a token.
And I don't believe that it was meant to be a token. I think that the task had just been so old that by the time the request was fulfilled, it just didn't apply anymore.
And then you think, well, okay, I can at least join the mailing list and sort of contribute to sort of just the general melody of the mailing list, and you can do that.
And then you're sort of, yeah, you can tip your hat and say, hey, I'm a part of this project. But where's the actual work?
And so I kind of found myself floundering in this group. And so I eventually drifted away. And then I approached it again at a later time from a different angle.
And I thought, well, maybe submitting some packages would be helpful because there are a couple packages that I'm noticing that this generic Linux distribution nameless Linux distribution is lacking.
So I might be able to roll a couple and submit them. And again, with something so technical and specific as you would hope, there were fairly specific instructions on how to achieve this, this means of contribution.
Like this was something that you could do. Here are the very definite steps. There's not a whole lot of, not a whole lot of wiggle room there. It's a very specific thing.
This is exactly what we need. Here are the requirements that you need to fulfill. If it passes that linter, then obviously it's good. You can submit it and we'll get it into the, we'll make sure it gets into the distribution.
Well, I did all that. Everything passed, submitted it through the bug tracker. And I am not lying to you, but I have, I have things that are waiting for approval that have been there for over a year now and still haven't been looked at.
And I kind of ping them every now and again, sort of like, okay, I'm pretty sure this is finished. Like, I don't know what to do next, but it's pretty much there it is.
And it's on your build system. So you really have to do, like, I don't know what you have to do actually, but, but as far as I know, there is nothing further for me to do. Like, I have done the thing that I believe I have signed up to do.
And there's just no closure. There's no, there's, there's nobody there on the other side to accept the thing, the submission and to, and to take it to the next step, whatever the next step may be.
And there's not even really any clear note of what the next step is. So I feel like this big Linux distribution has, has a lot of the infrastructure or a lot of the framework almost, almost there, you know, it's, it's got the, it's got the suggestion that, hey, you should join, join in, you should, you should get involved.
And then once you get past that, once you get through the door, it's got the greeter, you know, it's got that person, the annoying person in the t-shirt who says, hi, how you doing? You know, that person in the retail store that you wander into, it's got that, it's got that very helpful. Like, here's a map.
And here are all the different points on the map that you can go to to get involved. And so you do that. And the part that is breaking down, I would say, is that once you go to the desk with the thing that you,
that the thing that you have, that you are saying, hey, this is my contribution. Once you go there, there's nobody on the other side. There's just, there's not the, I don't know if it is a literal lack of, of manpower, like, we just don't have the people we need on the, on the receiving side to triage all of these potential contributions or, or what it is.
But I feel like it definitely breaks down at that level because both of my, my, my attempts, and I say two attempts, but actually there have been three attempts, one of which I, I won't even mention because it was, it's from a different angle that maybe doesn't really count because not everyone could do that because, you know, calling in favors and things like that.
So, yeah, there have been several attempts to sort of get officially involved with this thing and, and the official, the badge that you're going to show on your vest. In this case, it is something because you, you want something on the website, you know, you can't put it there. So you, you need the approval, just like on Slack builds, you know, you can, you can throw ideas to Slackware on a forum, and that's cool. And you could even say, hey, that I'm a, I'm, I'm part of the Slackware project.
Because I, I contribute to the general community, that's fair, just like you could say, hey, I'm a part of the project of this general, this generic Linux distribution, the tattoo is not naming, because I, I partake in that community, and that's fair, but, but at some point you do need that official sort of stamp of approval. Yes, this contribution has been accepted, and it is now on our servers, or it is now part of this artwork, or it is now part of whatever it is that you're contributing.
Close, close, but, but the infrastructure or, or something, the triage, something is not in place, and it is not working. Okay, so that's the second one, and I'm going to put that down on the low end of the, of the scale, sadly, because like technically, like, up to the point of it actually working, it's really well built.
But, but it's, it's not good. It, it actually, I would say that it's worse off than the Slackware model, because while it is very friendly up front, and it has that nice store front and, and greeters at the door, and, and all the nice furnishings and all the stickers and all the free t-shirts, if there's just, when, when you get there to, for everyone to commit to sign the deal for the transaction to actually occur, it just does not occur.
And that's a little bit, I'm, I'm going to say betrayal of trust, although I mean, betrayal is a big word, but you know what I mean? Like, like, you had everything that you thought, you, you completed your end of the transaction, you got your end of the, the bargain, and when you, when you go to deliver it, they fall short on their side of the bargain, bad, that's not good.
Okay, so the third case study is one that I've been, that I've very recently experienced, and it is as you may have guessed, just remarkably, a remarkable, an excellent example of how this sort of stuff really ought to work in my humble opinion.
And you'll see a lot of, a lot of hacker public radio in this, although I said I wasn't going to use hacker public radio, but, but I think there are, there are, there are some, some things that are pretty similar here between these two examples.
So the, the example that I'm, I'm talking about is a site, which you may or may not have heard of, called Libravox. That's L-I-B-R-I-V-O-A.
You've probably heard of it, at least in passing, if you ever heard of the, if you ever heard any of the book club, the hacker public radio book club, they, a couple of the, the people on there will, will use Libravox versions of a book that they're reviewing or, or they'll mention it in passing.
I've definitely heard of it from there. So Libravox is a source for audio books that are in the public domain, and that's, that's exclusively what they do.
They, they provide recordings of public domain books, and public domain here is defined as it is defined in the United States of America.
So if it's public domain in Australia, which I think is 70 plus, the life span of the author, whenever they died plus 70 years, it falls into the public domain.
And that's whether the author was American or Russian or Australian or English or whatever, doesn't matter. That's defined as public domain in, for instance, Australia.
Whereas in America, it's, whatever Disney decides, a copyright should be, is pretty much what copyright is, is defined as.
So that's, it's, it's American definition, which can be problematic because a lot of times you'll find something that is public domain, but not American public domain.
So Libravox is a great little site, and when you go there, if you go to Libravox.org, right away, there's, there's sort of a portal.
Free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers from around the world. So that tells you pretty much exactly what the, what the site is.
And the, there, there are two buttons, two buttons on the, on the front page.
One is to read a book, and one, and the other is to listen to a book.
So once again, you know exactly what your two choices are on this site. You can either listen to a book, or you can read a book that has not been read yet.
So if you click on the volunteer button to read, it takes you to a page that describes the, the project, or the process, rather, from kind of a high level view.
Like this is everything that happens when you volunteer, or this is, and these are all the different ways that you can volunteer.
And that's important because you, you may, you may, you may think, okay, I want to read a book for, for Libravox.
And then realize that, oh well, actually there's lots of other things involved in the production of a book, other than just reading.
So you can read, but, but maybe you don't really have time for that. Well, it turns out you can also read a short thing, like a poem, or you can listen.
You can be a proof listener. So there are lots of different aspects that, yes, you clicked on the, yes, I want to volunteer, but under the, you know, read for Libravox heading, but that doesn't mean necessarily that that's all you can do.
So it's a text heavy page, and I guess of all my criticisms for Libravox, that would be the, that would be one of the criticisms, is that there is a lot of text at every turn.
You kind of go to, to do something, and instead of, of clicking through kind of a story book, tale of, here's how you get from A to B, you kind of go with, like, well, there's A, and then, hey, look, there's B, C, and D, but, but if you really wanted to go to E, then just click here.
Okay, you click there, and then your F, G, H, I, J, okay, then click J, you know, and it's just, there's lots of things that you could possibly get distracted.
But if you stay focused, and I'm assuming that if, if a person has come here for a specific reason of, yes, I would like to read, actually, then, then they would stay focused.
They would, they would ignore the things that they don't care about. You can't really skim the page, though. I guess that's what I'm saying is it's, it's difficult to sort of go through this page and just sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't want to, don't care, don't care.
Oh, here's, here's, you know, it's like, it's, it's, they kind of bury a lot of the leads. That said, if you are looking to read a book, you're probably not that frightened of text.
And so you read through the text, and eventually you come across what I think should probably be at the top of their, their, their hit result of the, of the page, but it's basic setup for recording.
And there are three points, newbie guide recording, if you've never recorded, how to record for LibraVox, if you have, and how to record and submit a one minute test, highly recommended for all new readers, whether you have recording experience or not.
And so right there, you get all the different entry vectors to this new career that you're about to engage upon of being a reader for LibraVox.
And so you click on these things and you learn about the different processes. And so I would have probably, I'm, I'm from memory, I would have clicked on how to record if you'd recorded before.
And it tells you in very adult terms, hey, look, you've recorded before, here's what you need to know. Here's the, the levels that were after, here how, or how many seconds should appear at the beginning and the end of your file and so on.
And then it tells you you need to do a, before you do anything, you need to register for a forum. And the first stop on the forum is our one minute test. And once you do the one minute test, well, there's an article about how to do the one minute test. And once you submit that, then you get feedback on the forum from a live person from a, from one of their product managers or whatever, they're, they're, I forget what they're called, but the people who organize the, the stuff, their moderators, let's say, well, listen to your one minute test and tell you, yeah, it's good. No, it's not good.
That's too loud. It's too soft, whatever. They will give you specific feedback on this. And once you pass the one minute test, then you are free to do as you please on Libravox forum. You can sign up for a chapter, you can sign up for an entire book, you can, you can, you can post a new thing that you, that maybe no one else is working on yet. You can post that to the forum and, and, and sort of speak for it. And, and at every turn, you get feedback, really. That's been my experience, actually.
You, if you say, yes, I would like to read this story, then they, they will comments on that. They will say, yes, that is, that is fine. It looks, it looks good to us. That, that gets a, that gets an okay from us. And in some cases, you don't even need that because you know it's okay. It's on Gutenberg.org, which typically is a Libravox. If it's accepted, or if it's acceptable, rather than it is on Gutenberg. And if it's not on Gutenberg, then they, in my experience, they, they pretty much say it's a legal nightmare to confirm that some
thing is definitely in public domain. So they kind of avoid it. So you get feedback. It's very friendly. It is very verbose. There are people at the desk when you approach the desk that you wanted to go to. It's really, it's, it's quite, quite fantastic. Again, the only critique I have is possibly in some places. They are over verbose. And, and maybe the path to something very specific is a little bit too, maybe a little bit too many byways.
So that's the way it is off the main road that you could get possibly lost down. That said, in practice, I found it really, really easy. Like of all the experiences that I'd ever had contributing or attempting to contribute to something, this was, this was probably the, well, certainly the easiest and probably the one that, that if anything was going to give me a fuzzy feeling inside about, hey, I've really joined this thing and I found my community and blah, blah, blah.
It would be a Libra Vox experience would be it because they're, they're responsive. There, there's, there are people there. They're, it's, it's populated by people who speak. And, and it's a friendly community. They speak nice things. They say pleasant trees and they, they are excited about the, the books that they're reading and the fact that books are being read and, and they seem to be equally excited about all subject matters. It's, it's really quite a unique experience. And it was one they could kind of taken me by surprise because really what I wanted to do was, I just wanted to read one.
One, one work that I was particularly interested in on Gutenberg and I figured, well, if I'm going to read the thing, I might as well read the thing out loud. And if I'm going to do that, then I may as well post it to Libra Vox. And so that was my, that was my goal. That was my entry point. And it was such a pleasant experience. And it went so smoothly that it was almost as if though I hadn't, as if though I hadn't gotten involved in a project. And I mean that in a good way.
You know, like a lot of times, at least for me, the reason I don't get involved with something is because there's a lot of bureauc, there's a lot of, there's an overhead there.
It's my workflow personally is very fast. Well, I like it to be fast. And so to submit my work to something means that now suddenly I've, I have to wait on someone else's approval for something.
Well, why not just post it online and walk away from it? That's kind of my philosophy. So the fact that I was able to do this with Libra Vox and not notice, not have it hinder my workflow was huge.
And the fact that that they made it so clear as to their requirements, it really does show. Now, if you go listen to some early Libra Vox recordings, you will hear what I imagine their standards must have been quite lower, a lot lower.
Certainly the technology was, was newer and they were, they were encoding things that like I think 64 kilobits per second rather than 128, which is their default now.
So there, there are a couple of things here and there that, that you think, wow, that, that really must have, that must be a lot different now because this is a noisy recording and, and it's, it sounds really bad and whatever.
But, but I think that their process by now, certainly it seems like it's a well oiled engine and it just keeps going and it's super easy to get involved.
It is a friendly environment. It is, it is both rules heavy, but also friendly. And, and that's fantastic. I mean, that's exactly, you know, you just want the framework to be there.
But then you want the freedom to, and, and openness to do what you want once you're inside. And you, and once you are inside, you want to, you want to make, you want that there are, you don't want to be held back by the overhead of this project, not getting around to approving whatever it is you have decided to contribute.
So, LibraVox, if you've never, if you've never, well, you know what, what you should do, maybe, I mean, this might not be completely realistic because in order to really, to really experience everything, you have to go through the whole process.
But LibraVox is, is quite a good experience in terms of getting signed up. And so if you go to LibraVox and click on the volunteer button, just kind of pretend like, okay, well, I'm, I will imagine now that I'm going to become a reader.
It's easy, it is to get, how easy is it to get started reading? Or, well, okay, maybe I came here to read, but now I'm thinking, well, I don't really want to read, I'm going to be a proof listener.
How easy is it is to get involved with that? Like, and can you do that quickly? Can you, are there clear steps? See what you think? I, I found it quite, quite nice and quite inviting. And, and I've been back, I've been back after my initial read.
I did a couple of other things that they needed readers for and then I found some, some short stories that I figured may as well get read. So I proposed those and it got those into a collection.
So, a few things here and there, a smattering of things. And, and I anticipate going back again because I, it's a really, they, they make it really, really easy and fun to contribute.
And, and really, the only reason I haven't contributed more at this point is because of, you know, time constraints. But, on their end, everything is exactly as it needs to be.
So I'm placing them very high on the scale of easy and friendly and professional and effective. So that's LibraVox. I think if, if more projects looked at LibraVox or frankly hacker public radio in its current state, I, I think that there's a lot to be said for, for how effective it is.
And, I said I wasn't going to use hacker public radio as an example and I, I guess I'm not. I'm not using it as a case study, but I am going to, I'm going to note that today, hacker public radio, I mean, you go there and if you decide, okay, I think it would be kind of cool to, to record a show.
There's a link right up at the top, give shows and it kind of tells you exactly what you need to do to give, to, to give a show. The, the menu itself changes. So if you're looking for the theme song, then there's a link for the theme music that you can download and use in your recording.
And then there's eventually an upload button to allow you to request a slot and, and from there, it's, it's very, very easy and, and self explanatory. I would argue on how to make that happen.
It'd be interesting, I guess, to hear other people's impression, but like I say, I've seen a lot of different iterations of hacker public radio's submission process.
And I mean, it used, it's, it's been through some rough times. And, and now I, I feel like it is just such a pleasure to, to contribute to hacker public radio because you know exactly when your episode is going to air.
You know exactly when it has been approved. You know where to go to upload it. It's just, it's a really, really smooth, just easy process that, that I don't think there's a whole lot of room for confusion at this point.
It's, it's really, really well done. So congratulations to both, I guess Dave and Ken, I guess are the people behind that. I'm not really sure to be honest. I'm sure they'll tell us in the community episode though.
But yeah, it's, it's, I think it's, it's really well done. And I can't, I, I cannot identify, and maybe some people can. And I'd be curious as to hearing people talk about this, I guess, is, is, you know, what, what is there to do to get more, more interest, more contribution.
From more different people, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, I would love to hear more female voices on this, on this network. I think that'd be kind of cool.
I would like to hear more diversity in, in our, in our hosting. I think that would be really neat. I don't know how we make that happen though. I don't know what we can possibly do as a, as a, as a website to, to make people find us.
You know, it's, it's kind of a weird problem to have of, hey, we're here and we're open to all contribution from anyone about any subject. And now, how do you get those people, whoever they are to come to, to know that we are here? I mean, I really don't know.
I mean, the only way I know to do that is to go to conferences and HackerPulp Radio does that, or they, we try to. And if, certainly, if you're, if you are going to a conference with a, with an allotment of a community project space, then you should take HackerPulp Radio there. You know, I'm, I think we have a conference kit that you can request. And we will send it to you, although I don't know where it is right now today in this world, but, but it did exist at one point anyway.
And even if it doesn't, I mean, before we had that, I would just print out like a sheet of paper that says HackerPulp Radio. I made some stickers and I put them on a table for people to take. You know, you just, it's HackerPulp Radio. You can just, you can represent HackerPulp Radio if you want to.
So that's pretty simple to do. And that's the only thing I know to do really. I don't know how to drive publicity or, or contribution or interest or anything like that. I don't know how to do that sort of thing.
But we are here. It's easy to contribute to us. And I, I feel like we've done a pretty darn good job of both being inviting and, and of providing lots of feedback during the process.
Maybe the only thing that we could maybe consider at some point, maybe is sort of like, okay, you say you want to contribute. You don't know exactly what you want to contribute or maybe there's, you don't have, you don't have structure to what you want to contribute.
So you know you want to talk about something, but you're just not the kind of person who can put paragraphs in an order that makes sense to a listener.
So maybe we could have people available to help other people structure a show. And I think, I know that I have been asked in the past, and I've dropped the ball several times to be kind of like a soundboard for someone, you know, like, hey, jump on a HackerPulp Radio call with me so that I can talk at you in order to, you know,
in order to convey the ideas that I wouldn't know how to structure without someone asking me questions. So basically a request to interview, you know, interview me so that I can tell people about this subject.
And I've dropped the ball for a couple of different reasons. Sometimes it's because I don't know what I would ask in such an interview because maybe I'm just not familiar with the topic enough to even intelligently speak about it maybe.
And also I have a strong bias against that kind of delivery. I feel like I don't actually like usually learning from that kind of interview. That's not, to me, that's not informative. I prefer instruction. Like, tell me exactly what you need, what I need to do in order to get from this point to that point.
And I want bullet points from you, and that's all I want. And if you're going to tell me about something, and it's going to be parsed through interview questions, that probably aren't going to be very focused because the interviewer is feeling their way through this subject at the same time, I just don't feel like that's the most effective way.
Is it, is it, would it be better than nothing? Yeah, probably. And like I say, I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying I, I'm not defending myself for not jumping on and helping people with, with sort of their ideas. I'm just saying, I have, I have not done that in the past. And maybe that is something in the, in maybe that's something that we want to start doing is, is offering kind of like, hey, here's a, here's a person you can, you can talk to or here's, here's, here's someone who can help you develop like an editorial department, essentially, that might be interesting.
But other than that, I don't, I don't see how much more we could do. So anyway, that's, those are my thoughts on contributions for whatever they're worth. I really, the hacker public radio part was a bonus. The, the, the, the crux of this episode has been Slackware, generic Linux distribution and LibraVox, varying degrees of success and varying degrees of experience on the user's perspective.
Definitely learn from the ones that work. And I guess also learn from the ones that do not work. You know, take note, when you go to a project to contribute, what happens? How was, how was the response? Did the, did the project live up to its, to its side of the bargain of, of its contributor bargain?
Does it deliver on what it says it's going to do if you do, in fact, get involved? Thanks for listening. Talk to you later.
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