On this past Friday, we got the opportunity to work on a really great community effort. For those of you within the Portland technology community, you’ll probably already know about Strange Love, the most popular podcast on PDX tech, which is broadcasted live every Friday starting at 10pm PST. If you’re not yet familiar with the show, it’s the premiere post-Beer and Blog activity for Portland technologists and geeks.
Strange Love has hosted many of the community members who have been a great inspiration to us, and we were pleased (to say the least) when Dr. Normal — co-host of Strange Love and the man behind the cameras — approached us about how we might use the AboutUs page for StrangeLoveLive.com to support the show.
As it turns out, they had a little bit of a conundrum. Strange Love needed some show notes, but since it was broadcasted live, there was no post-production time to create them.
The solution? Letting all the devoted fans of Strange Love write some notes themselves through the AboutUs wiki.
Since everyone already congregates in the Strange Love chat room, getting enough collaborators to lend a hand was a snap. For really fast group writing, we used a dedicated EtherPad during the show itself, and then moved the complete notes to a subpage of the Strange Love AboutUs page to preserve them for posterity.
The kind of fast-paced collaboration we did for Strange Love was a lot of fun, and it’s just the kind of creative use of AboutUs we like. For all you podcasters out there, don’t be shy about using the wiki for similar organizing. For Strange Love devotees, we’ll see you Friday night. Join us, won’t you?