HPR2035: Building Community

This is droops and this is also Hacker Public Radio.

I love HPR and noticing our current need for shows, I put it on my list that I needed to help out. But what to talk about?

Let’s talk about growing HPR. It is a cool show and project, but if the community does not grow the show will end. People run out of shows to host and others have to fill that space.

I think we do a great job doing outreach to the community by going to conventions, getting mentioned in articles and magazines, and being cool with everyone. But as a community we could do a little more to get to the 4000 show mark. Even my lazy butt can help with these things.

First, let’s bring more traffic to the site. To do this we need content, which is really all we have. But we need to be more clever with how we use it.

We need to transcribe all of our shows. This allows search engines to better index our content and bring more people to our site. Maybe they won’t subscribe or even listen to a show with the content being readable, but they were not going to listen anyway by not finding us. This is a big chore and we would need a team with leadership to do it.

We need more popular hosts (this sounds bad taken at face value) to guest host shows and mention HPR on their shows. We used to do this by sending in bumpers like “this is droops from Hacker Public Radio and we live whatever this show is. Hacker Public Radio is a daily show created by the community”. Let’s make a list of podcasters we want to guest host or mention our show and go after them.

Speaking of guest hosts, let’s work on interviewing more people who will put our show on their blog/social media. We did this in the early days of Twatech with Moka5 and we got a lot of traffic from this. I do know that we already do this, but not everyone who listens contributes a show and this is an easy way to do it.

What if we made it easier to record shows? Maybe have an Android/iOS app to record and submit shows from.

We could have a tool to submit show topics or do a survey to find out what people are interested in. This may prompt people to record shows by knowing that someone would be interested in it.

Someone could get some free stock photos (or better yet we could just take our own) and put show titles over the images to share on social media. People click on images. I will do this so that everyone can see my ugly face.

On that note, how about a video that explains what HPR is. This may be a good droops project. That would be something awesome to share on social media.

The website, which is a lot of work, needs to have related shows listed on each individual shows page. This will take a tag system and someone to tag all of the almost uncountable previous episodes.

One of my favorite show formats is reviews of software/media. This is so much in our community to keep up with and HPR is perfect for this. Everyone should do a show about some unique software they use or a cool book they are reading or a cool documentary they watched. Five minutes about something cool would bring me into learning more about it.

Currently my classes are watching a documentary about the Silk Road called Deep Web (https://www.deepwebthemovie.com/). I should do a show on it to talk about privacy, government, all the cool things it brings up. We have not gotten far into the documentary yet as we keep stopping it to have discussions.

Also I love stickers, we should set up a store to sell stickers and t-shirts. Heck this is HPR, we should have tote bags. We can either sell them at cost or make a profit to pay for hosting or swag to give away.

Hacker Public Radio is driven by the community and our community as a whole is much smarter than I am. Let’s put our minds together and grow our show.

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