recording management systems
- type: design doc
- Liminal Space Agency records almost all of its conversations.
- This sort of thing is becoming more common, especially with
- Zoom having a built-in recording feature
- apps like Otter that can make automatic transcripts
- Sharing recordings within a team can be a powerful tool to support coherence among a team:
- shared information
- shared situational awareness
- shared vibe & sense of each other
- finding out what conversations are like amongst your people when you're not in them
- being able to communicate feedback (ie our experiences of each other) candidly but without that having to be done in a kind of direct, confrontative way
- Our current systems at LSA for managing recordings are essentially crude file-folder systems which are disturbingly inadequate for the task, in much the same way that digital file-folder metaphors are inadequate for organizing one's thoughts, research, open questions.
- We have explored using Roam for keeping track of recordings as well, and I think there's a decent chance that one way or another, Roam will be a core system in the long-term for this... but short term it is kind of one layer out from the recordings themselves, in a few senses:
- you can upload files to Roam but it's very hard to keep track of them and afaict atm if you lose the link to the file it's just unreachable forever because it doesn't have a name, just a url
- you can't easily play audio files in roam. sure, you can use hiccup to embed a little <audio> player, but it's very primitive
- roam's attribute tables are cool & show lots of promise, but currently not actually useful for organizing large numbers of things, for many reasons
- What's my vision?
- It could be described as a cross between:
- soundcloud
- otter
- google drive
- roam
- airtable
- Basic workflows
- Upload a recording & indicate:
- date
- visibility
- listenability
- (time)
- (people in recording)
- (location/context)
- (people who may immediately want to listen)
- (whether to generate a transcription)
- (preface/context/framing)
- (related recordings)
- Listening to a recording
- < lots of things could be said about how to make a high-quality audio player for long-conversations >
- most of it would also apply to podcast apps
- see this thread:
- Discussing a recording
- it would be cool to be able to
- Extract parts from a recording
- but not just into "separate files" - the parts could retain awareness that they're part of a larger whole
- could share part of a recording without sharing the whole thing
- could extract parts in like a "
- or based on complex editing of a transcript
- Commentary on these:
- visibility is hard but it's possible to do way better
- currently a thing we manage really crudely. We have a huge google drive folder and we add the recordings to it. Gradually we've needed to add more and more people to that folder, which inasmuch as the folder is something we'd like to keep digitally secure, does not feel good.
- Meanwhile, there are also lots of recordings that it doesn't initially make sense to share with everybody, so those end up not in shared folders at all and sometimes very hard to find later
- It would be great to separate visibility from listenability, in the sense of like, there are very few recordings that we need to hide the existence of, and this would be a cool opportunity for people to say "oh, that looks interesting, I'd like to listen"
- Sources
- somewhere I had a conversation with Connor Turland about this on a walk in 2016 or 2017, which is probably recorded
1 linked reference
What would a fluid or meta-systematic team coordination app look like?
- I like the create+notice+leverage concept. All three of those are important, and they get at the importance of information flow. Honestly, if I were to try to build a piece of software to make Liminal Space Agency more effective, I'm not sure that it wouldn't just be an recording management systems. With all of the features I described to Connor Turland.