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Invitation: Creating summarizing transcripts for the OGM calls

Thanks a lot for these constructive contributions! That’s exactly the kind of discussion I want to have in/with this thread :slight_smile: And splitting/branching/forking off new project invitations and activities is a good vehicle to get some progress started into this general direction, much apprechiated.

I’m very much for checkins and don’t mind them, even as I myself usually don’t update others that much about my personal current affairs that much, and tend to report more on project progress, but I clearly see the purpose and benefit for each of these habits, and indeed sometimes the personal/social work is the main work, or for all of the philosophical explorations, a checkin can as well be the opportunity to notify about a new discovery or change of view.

I only get annoyed if the personal checkins get mixed into a meeting that’s also supposed to report on project progress or coordinate practical activities, because lots of shared time gets wasted on talk that’s in no way productive for the tasks at hand. And the talk about the many boring details of “doing” must seem wasted for those who attend for growing personal connections.

In my opinion, there’s no point at all in trying to somehow merge the two and reach some common denominator, which is then sub-ideal for everybody. Also, no need to separate the two, as we gain of course a lot from listening in and gaining general awareness about what’s going on, who the others are, what they do, how they feel, how they think, their character/values/concerns, etc.

Therefore, I would favor to remain agnostic in regard of the question how much airtime the different topics for their different purposes should get, especially as I have the easy way out of not attending these group calls in the first place and prefer project coordination in asynchronous ways on the Kanban board or issue/task tracker, avoiding many of the common problems that can easily become huge sinks for productivity.

For the OGM calls, OK, I can imagine that the extend of checkins vs. other discussion might be an important question, and the after-the-fact curation of the recording offers no way out nor improvement for those who attend in the moment. At the same time, with a little bit of tooling, clips could easily be extracted which are just the checkin part, or just the open discussion (or themed topic of the week). Each of these might be splittable into checkin per person, so you could get your update feeds for individuals you’re subscribing to (aggregated into a weekly digest), almost like them sending you their weekly podcast entry, which could develop into a conscious instrument/medium more deliberately used for exactly such purpose. For the other part of the call as well, I would assume that with some tagging, the portions/sections/clips could be grouped by topic, to basically figuratively “go under the corresponding node in the brain”, and potentially even branching out to other groups and communities, to sprinkle some similar/aligned clips in. I mean, who knows if that would turn out to be entirely awesome or rather somewhat boring and flawed, but I can’t really imagine why it would be the latter, and then give it a try, and be it for the learning and understanding how such a practice could work out, also for greater questions about curation and facilitation.

Technically, I would consider this entirely feasible, super-easy, quick and cheap. I just hesitate a little to go into the actual content work (I’m more or less already are somewhat used to anyway), for reasons of vague/questionable licensing (not bad, not ideal), that I don’t want to keep only myself occupied with it instead of also doing more software development, and specifically want to test how serious those are who constantly bring up this topic as being super-valuable and urgently needed, but just some other person is supposed to do it for them, not doing any kind of even minor, occasional work themselves. This explicitly excludes people like Jerry or Pete, who have their hands full with all sorts of other important content/tech/people work, and have a understanding how technical tooling can help with the recorded artifacts, and already took/take steps towards curation independently themselves, and also aren’t those who endlessly only talk about it without investing into such practices. In essence, this is a call for the librarians, curators, knowledge workers, which we are as well ourselves, but also by necessity currently have to fill a bunch of other roles as well, which unfortunately doesn’t leave much capacity for content/curation work despite it or the results could turn out to be somewhat enjoyable, by comparison or in general. :slight_smile:

I had some shared background with the media work by what’s now CICoLab, don’t want to go too much into details, but to me theirs is mostly about producing new content, not the tooling. Just the video you’ve linked, that’s a great promotional/inspiring piece, but I can’t help to personally find it rather useless to learn about what was discussed, important findings, navigating through the full record and its topics, how these soundbites connect to something else. I don’t want to produce results like this example, even if they’re great to listen to, might be much more successful/viral, or what not. I need media curation for effect, to actually learn something, make sense, gain some overview, stay up to date, navigate though things, connect/coordinate things, to ultimately get a better handle on complexity.

The good part is that the tooling is mostly, if not always, univeral/content-agnostic. Can also work for material by CICoLab or OGM or many other media collections and conversation/collaboration groups. The minimal requirement would be that the material must be public (playing around with the “semi-public”, “unlisted” nonsense isn’t useful) because how else would you even reference and with permission/consent share/embed/link it without making all these people angry who don’t want their stuff shared in the first place? Ideally, with libre-free licensing, it could even become a source for creating derivative works (“remix”, but I’m not much in favor of that term/notion, more along the lines of OER/OA etc.).

You can’t @-mention notify Lauren, because she’s not registered here and the forum isn’t public.

Good distinction to call out. Purpose. Content. Tooling. Process. People. I tend to focus on purpose, process and people. :wink:

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One massive problem these days is that there’s hardly anybody doing any tooling of the kind needed/useful here, have to admit that I myself don’t do much of/for it either unfortunately. There’s a whole range of interesting reasons why that is, and it’s barely realized/recognized. At the same time, more content gets created and added to the pile of existing backlog/longtail than ever before, while also loosing and duplicating earlier efforts/works, and little chance to get significantly better with that. :slightly_frowning_face:

Turns out that @max works on something based on the transcripts of the OGM call recordings. Summarized transcripts are something different from the raw transcripts in their full length, but beyond this practical project invitation/experimentation, of course there are some ideas about what could be done with recordings, so as these other people might already do some of it on their own, let’s put this project invitation on hold for now to not unnecessarily duplicate work and waste capacity. This is a typical example of bad or lack of project management, partially caused by a lack of better/proper tooling.

Update: Could well be that Max mostly works on it as a content project for debates about climate change and less as an universal tooling project as this project invitation does. If the former, might be related to @BentleyDavis’ work for on conversational argumentation/debate.

Aha, sounds like the CICoLab + OLC/MetaCAugs people want to finally build something around the follow-up usage of the extracted clips, which is one reason more why there’s no need to duplicate and waste time on it within this project effort.

Mark Trexler, who happens to be not on this Discourse, does clips/summaries as content work/curation for the Climate Web. Sounds like it’s not covering tooling, as this project invitation does.

Here’s a demo of the visualize zoom on miro … super prototype-y

Here’s a collab-able Miro board with the output from the proto-app:
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_knZS4J0=/

– I’m working Zoom to Miro as much more of a universal tooling project – seeing potential (real time transcription, annotation, synthesis, topic clustering, concept connection … all the rich pre-processing to enable subsequent sense-making endeavors)

Separately I think universal argument maps per subject area (~ kialo 2.0) are proving critical in advancing human debate of complex systems (climate, racism, health, etc) .

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Thanks a lot for sharing! I know several people who work mostly on their own and/or in secret on related ideas, but great to see that you managed to actually build some of it already!

I think the main advantage of the transcript from Zoom is that they identify the speakers (as the meeting service of course can identify from which connection of which account the audio feed/mic streams in and gets distributed to the other attendants). Reminds be a little bit of Frode Hegland’s and Sam Hahn’s “TimeBrowser” (warning: that’s not active, is abandoned). I myself usually don’t care much about the transcript, as it can be of poor quality (dialect, names, multiple people talking at the same time), and there’s also rambling, organisational chatter and other conversational noise in there. On the other hand, I’m kind of along the lines of automatically generating a word cloud from a transcript for, let’s say, 1 minute segments or something (in case of speaker identification, per speaker segment), and then filter/clean that up, and this way automatically mine/extract/recognize the topics/themes in a pretty easy and useful way (basically reducing the noise).

At the same time, another approach we’ve prototyped for this thread is to enable everybody to segment portions of a recording thematically (also fragmenting a single speaker into segments, or spanning across several speakers) with a brief summary (also tagging/categorization could eventually be added), so these could go into separate feeds, like only the weekly checkins, or checkin by person for each week, or all the mentions of a certain topic through all these calls. Of course there’s already the automatic cutting/clipping into small video bits, and these could also automatically merged/concatenated again into separate videos per theme/topic, with some navigational interface on top of it so it becomes very easy to follow a certain interest, catch up quickly, stay up to date, and also forward/distribute/promote certain themes elsewhere, without the need of sharing many hour-long recordings.

To me it looks like you’re not really much using Miro other than it being another simple list/table, which is fine, as I think a simple list/table/feed would do just as well. For an online map/graph like workspace, potentially to move clips around and group them into buckets/feeds, I have several components around that could be used for that as well - maybe not for the final tool solution, but for cheap, early prototyping, gluing these things together and testing out how things could work out well.

It still remains an issue that it doesn’t look that there’s anybody with some inherent motivation around and interest, capacity, need and benefit to do the content work, which I always find strange, because given all these people who tend to participate in such group calls, they usually all agree that curation of their very own material would be important, but of course don’t really want to deal a second time with their own stuff, and therefore every other week or so the last week gets forgotten, and the same topics come up again and again, with little learning or progress, as this linear “phone” medium tends to cause. I’m for that matter much more interested in hypermedia, including big collections of recordings for which the source doesn’t include speaker identification or transcripts (sure, can be still be generated later).

You probably too can easily imagine that the Miro list/table could also include a video clip embed or at least timecode reference links to the original source from the VTT. No need to prematurely cram that into the early prototyping, of course :slight_smile:

Yep… YouTube videos embed in MIro w time code “start from” — which is just an added parameter/query string of ‘&t=_m_s’

These could be generated automatically through a number of means, e.g Note-taker Time+topic annotations, and bulk rendered into Miro in time-line location. Or into topic cluster/network.

In this project and also beyond/elsewhere, I’m using the “embed” URL in an iframe, because that takes a start and an end position (in total seconds, as MediaFragments prefer too), which has the nice advantage that the video playback actually stops (but can be continued, if the viewer wants). Like a clip, but without actual clipping (which could be arranged too, if needed, but yeah, hosting/copyright).

That’s probably not much useful for working with/from the VTT, where the chunks/segments are arbitrarily split by text length of a portion of the transcript. Using the t parameter of the regular video “watch” URLs is then probably more for jumping into the video, for navigational purposes.

So this thread here is about starting work on tools under a libre-free license which help with audio/video curation, also doing it as a practice/exercise for the OGM call recordings content-wise so this group too may benefit from it, but the software is of course generic/universal and can be used on any material. Would you want to join and participate in this, or are you off doing your own thing, maybe planning for a proprietary product, maybe content-wise helping out CICoLab with their transcripts?

John Smith is not part of OGM as far as I know, but it strikes me that he could be a generative contributor to this conversation. John D. Smith John.Smith@LearningAlliances.net

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Are you suggesting that I should reach out to him, and invite? In case there’s some trouble with OGM/Discourse as an entity/place, it’s also an option to compile a brief overview over the general audio/video curation activities here and elsewhere, to then see if that sparks some interest.

@Jerry - I can’t recall the inviting protocol, but I keep thinking John Smith would have insights into the things @skreutzer and @max are working on. Would it be ok if you invited him? (I do know he is a bit offline right now w/ family stuff.)

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@NancyW Any updates on this? I think (according to the most recent OGM check-in call) the inviting protocol is that everybody is invited, be it calls or this Discourse forum. Or if not, fine as well. Are you suggesting asking him or other people to register here? Another option would be to take this out of the Discourse forum and put it into some open project management place. Another option would be directly reaching out, should I shoot an e-mail?

I think Jerry invited him. I continue to be buried in work so I have not made any advancements on my own contributions…

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Howdy! I’ve added John to the OGM list and am sending a reminder note about the Thursday call now. If the stars line up, he can join us.

Hi Jerry, that’s fine, but I think Nancy or at least me wonder about inviting him (and others) to this Discourse, because it’s here where our discussion about this Action! practical project is, and especially as it’s about curation and transcripts, that’s all for asynchronous consumption, avoiding any need to have to wait until some stars eventually align or not. Additionally, Nancy sometimes is otherwise occupied and can’t attend the call, I’m never attending the call because it’s on Zoom, and then there are others working on transcript things which seem to not report much in this Discourse thread. It’s a big mess, best addressed with focus on how to bootstrap our way out of it. If people present something about video curation or transcripts within the call, I would need their tool/methodology applied and in use in order to efficiently learn about it to begin with, which up to this point apparently isn’t the case yet.

What I would want to learn, opinions/arguments which speak for or against

  1. Inviting just about anyone to this Discourse we can/want
  2. Selectively those who we think could be interested or have something to contribute around the topics discussed in here
  3. Nobody (for the time being) because things still need to be set up in some other way, so there would be no point in blowing the space up just to then have to move/migrate again

That’s something I wonder about because the Discourse forum isn’t linked on the main page, and it’s not public. Is the correct way to use the onboard Google Form, which will also invite people to register to the Discourse, as the correct procedure? Avoiding that they register themselves here, but don’t provide data and get added to other spaces via the Google Form? Apologies for asking, I’m just not aware what the policy is, or where to look the current state of it up. For the calls, I think it was said that everybody is invited to join.

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@skreutzer, in my opinion, it’s okay (and actually good) to invite anybody to OGM Forum (this Discourse) who would benefit from or improve the conversation.

To do so, just have them go to the OGM Forum home page, https://forum.openglobalmind.com/ and tell them to click the “Sign Up” button to create a new account. One of the admins will approve them within a day or two, or ping me by email or DM to make sure I get to them ASAP.

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This activity is closed and superseded by machine transcription, potentially upcoming speaker “swimming lane” on Miro and the index of recordings.

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