 I'm Grayson Penland, otherwise known as ComputerKid on IRC and stuff. I am the host and producer of the Fedora podcast. Edward is my co-host, he was going to be here but wasn't able to, and we've also got Michael here. He is our network partner from DLN. He's going to talk more later in the talk. Next slide. What is the Fedora podcast? If you just want to know at a very high level what the Fedora podcast is, all you really need to hear is this section. The Fedora podcast is a 25-45-minute podcast. It is released in seasons each season consisting of 10 episodes. Each episode comes out on every other Tuesday at 6 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It contains interviews with people around the Fedora community and news about Fedora. It is targeted at anyone who wants to learn more about Fedora. You should be able to hear it anywhere you listen to podcasts, but if you don't, please let us know because we want to make it that way. Our website is at podcast.fodoroproject.org, and it's produced by me and co-hosted, and it's also co-hosted by Edward. However, we're open to new hosts at any time. It would be really awesome if we could get some more hosts into this project. Timeline, where did it come from? It officially began in February of 2018, a project by the Fedora marketing team spearheaded by Edward. After a brief hiatus, I joined the team, and it started sort of era three of the show or season two, as we're calling it. So I started a new effort to refresh the podcast, trying to take the core values of the show and remake certain parts that might need to be refreshed. So it began then. Of course, while I led the effort, there were numerous people who helped immensely. Edward, of course, as a co-host, did a ton of the work, but we also had help from a Fedora contributor who goes by technology and makes music. He wrote us some amazing original theme music that you've heard on every episode in season two. Ryan Gorley from Fedora Design Team completely redesigned our website and all of our artwork, including making us some new logos with the new Fedora logo, which there was a talk given on earlier in this conference. Everything he made for us looks extremely professional. And if you want to see more from him, his website is freehive.com. And Michael Tunnell, who we have here in the camera right next to me, he is the co-founder of the Destination Linux Network and one of the biggest names in Linux podcasting. He provided us a ton of advice and even made us a show on the Destination Linux Network. So let's get more into that. One of the biggest changes in the new Fedora podcast is our partnership with DLN, the Destination Linux Network. For this part, I'm gonna hand the virtual microphone over to Michael to explain what DLN is and how we're working with them. So hi, everybody. Thanks, Grayson. I'm Michael Tunnell, a podcaster, YouTuber and open sourcer and co-founder of Destination Linux Network. The focus of the Destination Linux Network is to spread a new era of open source and Linux through education, entertainment, universal access and inspiration, I guess. DLN delivers high quality family friendly content across all forms of media, whether it's podcasting, videos, written content on front page Linux, all sorts of stuff. And part of our mission is to be community focused. So when we learned that the Fedora podcast was being revived, we were excited to participate however we could. Grayson took the advice that I offered and quickly exceeded expectations. He put a lot of work into the Fedora podcast when we were impressed by his hustle, so we wanted to get more involved as much as we could. And this led to a partnership between the Fedora project and DLN, which I think has been great for everyone. Yeah, DLN has been immensely helpful with giving us advice and support in the process of refreshing a podcast. Whatever you're doing, it's always just helpful to have someone on your team who has tons of experience. And that was DLN for us. They helped us avoid issues where we could have had issues and they showed us things that are hard to understand when you're new to this. Also joining up with DLN, it's safe to say that we got a benefit from DLN's marketing. By being part of the DLN community, we were able to get a huge listener boost quickly. I've personally talked to folks who got to know more about Fedora through learning and then listening to us through DLN, which I think is just awesome. Yeah, absolutely. And also Marie pointed out in the chat that DLN is also a media partner for Nest with Fedora. So there's that. Oh, that's true. Nice. Okay, so another change I mentioned is the release schedule. From here onwards, like I said, we're using a seasoned approach, not like with seasoning, but more of we're splitting it up into seasons. The first 10 episodes can now or considering them season one. After that is season two, which is what we're doing right now. Currently, we're six episodes into season two, which means we've got four more before we end this season. Each season, including season one, we'll have 10 episodes. And in season two, but possibly also in the future, like I said, releasing episodes every other Tuesday at six AM. I'm very hopeful that there will be a season three and that I can have a hand in it and sort of help out, but that will depend on my free time, how many other people are involved and that type of thing. The benefit of having seasons though is that we can stockpile episodes, topics, interviews, and ideas over the course of the off season. And then they can all be put together to make a new season. From my point of view, it's likely that over the school year, we're gonna slowly gather episodes and topics, then during the summer, we can really work on pushing everything together and releasing a new season. However, there's a chance that stuff could be coming sooner. So stay tuned. Perhaps we want to try some different stuff between the seasons. What I mean by that is we would like to try maybe doing different formats of episodes or doing extra long episodes or doing a breaking news episodes. And those would be something we could play with between seasons. It would kind of be like the time to just try new things before we set up a whole season. Okay, what we've been talking about in season two is we've been running with a theme of Fedora 34, talking about Fedora 34 things. For instance, we've talked about Butter FS, which was two parts, pipe wire and Kinoite. We've also talked about the KDE spin and the I3 spin. If you want to listen to those, you can find them at podcast.fodoroproject.org. Also in the future, we're gonna be talking about Nome 40 and some other topics. Okay, and next is how well that's all been going. If you were at the trivia, you heard that we recently hit 10,000 total downloads, which has been an awesome, awesome milestone. And today we do expect at least 500 downloads just on day one of releasing an episode. We can assume that most of those day one downloads are subscribers, even though we can't directly download that. And I think that's an awesome amount of downloads for just day one, especially since this podcast is really just in a niche community and it's only ever released 16 episodes that we're measuring with that 10,000. And yes, that does include streams, downloads and streams on any platform, go into that metric. Also, for any of you who have noticed that some of the questions in the trivia were outdated, we are now sitting at 14.5,000 downloads. Nice. Okay, why I think or at least hope that the Fedora podcast is important. I've personally always thought that podcasts were a really cool medium to get things out. They can be long or short, you can listen to them while doing many other things. They could be simple like the Fedora podcast or they can be complicated like a radio show. They can be done live or listen to years afterwards. Anyone with a microphone can make a podcast or you can build an entire team of people who have a career in this, just to make a single show if it's a really big show. I don't think that the Fedora podcast is ever gonna replace something like the Fedora magazine, but I do hope that it can find a comfortable spot in the Fedora community alongside things like the community blog, the magazine and conferences like this one to help folks learn about Fedora and what we're doing. Another thing is we have to keep up with everyone else. During COVID, podcasts have really blown up. Everyone these days has a podcast and listens to them. So now is a great time to have a podcast, possibly the best time ever. Also, Ubuntu has the Ubuntu podcast so like we gotta keep up with that and do better than them. There's also a thing about podcasting for, especially for Fedora and any kind of project like this, it is a very beneficial thing to get the word out for the things that you're doing. Like there's a lot of, that you talked about the Butterfest, the Pipe Wire and the Kino White stuff. There are things that people are just not aware of and this podcast makes it easier to, share specific things that people could learn as you're saying multitasking while they're doing other things. They can learn about those things and get people more aware of all the great stuff Fedora's doing. Definitely, it's a great way to get stuff out. Okay, and then my last thing is contributing. Right now, the Fedora podcast is mainly done by me, the host and producer and Edward, who's a co-host. Of course we want more contributors always. There are a few places in specific where we could use help. Speaking is one of them. If you have things to talk about, here is a place to talk about them. Let's say for instance, you're a packager who maintains a really cool package, just like I'm sure all packagers do. You can come on the podcast maybe and talk about that package to help more people learn about it. We could do an interview with you, you could explain it and then we could publish that after editing it or anything like that. If you want to do that, please reach out to us. We also would like people who connect kind of like correspondence, either by researching topics and then coming on the show to explain them or by going out and interviewing folks around the Fedora community. That would be super cool. We do have one guy who's working on this, but we'll keep that secret until it comes out. Also, audio engineering. Currently, I'm the only one who engineers audio, but if you have experience in it, then we could use you. You can be super helpful. So if that sounds interesting to you or you would want to do that, reach out to us. Spreading the word is another thing that we need. Just telling people about the Fedora podcast is super helpful. The podcast is pointless without listeners and without people talking about it, we won't have any more listeners. So please reach out to your friends maybe, people who are outside of the Fedora community, people who don't even use Linux and share the podcast with them if that sounds interesting to you. There are also probably other ways that you could help us, that we haven't even thought of yet. If that's true, you could reach out to us. How to reach out to us is right here. We've got our matrix room, pound fedora-podcast on matrix.org, our IRC room, pound fedora-podcast on Lavera Chat and those two are bridged together thanks to NB and the rest of the people working on that IRC thing and email podcast at fedora-project.org. And we've also got our packer, which is where most of this planning goes on, which is packer.io slash fedora-podcast slash issues. Every interview we're gonna do goes in there, every idea, every topic. So you could go there, you could look through these, recommend interviewees, ask how you can help in a specific one if it interests you or you could file new issues if there's something you want to talk about or something you want to hear about. And everyone who contributes will definitely get a shout out on the show and a fedora badge. So if you're trying to get as many badges as possible, we've got one that we're holding only for fedora-podcast contributors. I'm not sure if I have that badge yet, we need to fix that. Hey, I'm pretty sure I gave it to you. All right, I'll check. Yeah, so that's all I had on the list to talk about. If you have any questions, please put them in the QA section and I would be happy to answer them. Or maybe Michael, if there's some DLN questions. Okay, first question, best audio all day. How do you ensure the people you interview have good audio? So this is a problem that I think anyone who tries to do a podcast has to face because there are, most of the time guests just don't have good audio. They have their webcam mic, they have just their laptop. So we try to do our best by asking them, well, do you have earbuds? Cause that always makes it sound better. Do you have, do you have like any sort of microphone? But if they don't, we take that too. We do our best. We can impose processing, but we're never going to bar anyone off the show just because they don't have good audio. Also, there's a lot of things about when someone's a host of a show, they're expected to have good audio. If they're a guest of the show, there's a little bit more tolerance then for the audience. So it doesn't have to be the best quality audio for a guest. Obviously you want to put as much effort as you can as possible to get that, but it doesn't, it's not required most of the time. However, headphones are always required. Yes, never use speakers and a microphone. Speakers and a microphone are a bad combination. Very bad. Okay, next question. Let's say you do a podcast episode with me as a guest and I say something really stupid. Will you cut it out if I ask you? Well, if it's stupid enough, we'll probably cut it out without asking you. Yeah, that's a wonderful question. If you ask, we will always cut it out if you don't feel like you want it to be shared on the podcast. It is your voice, not ours. And we're going to cut out anything you want us to cut out. Yeah, so we have had times where like someone just bungles a sentence, everyone does it. Sometimes we just cut that out or they say something that's wrong, everyone does that too, we just cut that out. And it's fine. The next question is, would you consider doing some episodes about seasoning like as in actual seasonings? Yes, we're going to talk about Recono on the next episode. Then later, we're going to do some cumin and then we're going to mix it up on the next one after that and do a sprinkle of like a surprise seasoning set. Yeah, so I would say in the off season, probably on Taco Tuesday. Yes. Maybe do one episode about taco seasoning. Absolutely. I'm down to participate in that one. If there's anyone in the audience that wants to talk about seasonings, specifically taco seasoning. For our Taco Tuesday episode. I like that question. I do too. How do the Fedora podcast listener statistics compare to other topical podcasts on DLN? The numbers sound really awesome to me, but I literally have no reference. Yeah, so I'm kind of the same way. So I'm just going to kick this question to Michael. He's got the best frame of reference here. I do. So the Fedora podcast is the most topical, the most specific to a particular thing related to like a, you know, the project itself, not necessarily like a all catch all thing. I guess the most the closest one to that is hardware addicts where it's a hardware related thing that's very specific to hardware, but you know, that itself is a giant topic. So it's not really comparable in that sense, but in terms of the downloads, it's a very good, especially since if you think about it's only been six episodes for the latest season and that like there's not that much to use in terms of creating a momentum yet. So that's why like the numbers are fantastic with the just few episodes that are already been there. So I mean, I was very surprised when I saw the, you know, the 500 downloads instantly, like that is a day one thing like that is fantastic. And you know, at some point, with hopefully season three, we're gonna be able to do that sometime as soon as possible with weather Grayson and someone else works on it. I think that there's gonna be a lot of potential for the Fedora podcast going forward too. Marie suggested that we do an April Fool's episode about seasoning. Sadly, we've already got an April Fool's episode because there are too many dumb things you can do on the Fedora podcast, but we'll see maybe we release twice in one day. Yeah, Sam. Yeah, it's really awesome to hear the download ship. It's a, I think it's a combination of having a already well-built kind of fan base in Fedora. Fedora just has a really awesome community and also DLN, kind of the same deal. We matched two awesome communities together and got a lot of downloads. Yeah, and it worked out quite well because I was really happy to see when the podcast was being refreshed. I was so curious about what was gonna happen. And then when I saw that you were being involved in it, I instantly was like, okay, well, let's make sure it's the best it can be because like, as I said in the talk, that your hustle was so impressive. Like, let's push just all the way. And that's why we wanted to do the, that's why we wanted to be a part of the Fedora podcast in some way. And now obviously I couldn't host it because I already have three shows, but it was, it is like, yeah, so sad. It is great that you're, you know, there's so much progress already. And the combination of both communities is definitely beneficial there. And we're excited on the deal inside to help grow the podcast even more. Also, I'm a Fedora user too. So that kind of works out. Yes. We may have both been convinced by the same person to switch to Fedora or tricked maybe, tricked into used Fedora, I don't know. It depends on your perspective, but yes, we were both persuaded. Persuaded. Okay, that works. The next question is, what platform do you use for doing the podcast? That is a very complicated question. What, what, what platform, like the platform we record on, the platform we edit on, the platform we hosted on, could you clarify that a little bit? I'd be happy to answer it though. There are a lot of different platforms. Yeah. And there's all, and all of those things are important and they're all separate platforms. Okay, the next question is, if you have Ifa on the show, will it just be a long string of bleeps? That's a good question. It might have to be, it's possible. We also will like, maybe just make her say everything three times until she says it in a family friendly way. We wanna keep this podcast family friendly. So maybe she won't, maybe she won't be able to be on the show. I don't know. It's not looking good. The next question is, where is this podcast? So our website is podcast.fodoraproject.org, which it's on like, it's on Apple podcast, it's on Google podcast, it's on Stitcher, it's on all the podcast apps. That's, I think that's what you're asking. So I hope I answered that well. The platform to record and edit and interview on. So we do our recordings on Jitsi. We use the OpenSUSA Jitsi server because Fedora doesn't have one yet. I promise once Fedora has a Jitsi server, we're gonna switch to that one. But right now, we wanna use Jitsi because open source and OpenSUSA has the best Jitsi server. Editing, we edit in, well, I edit in Audacity because that's all I know. I'd love to learn something more advanced like our door, but for now we're sticking with Audacity. I am kind of feeling the limits of what a basic editor like Audacity can do, but for now that works, especially with just an interview show. Recordings is complicated. I usually run like two recordings at the same time. I record myself once in Audacity, just because I trust it the most. And then there's this app called PulseCaster that Paul Friel, a previous Fedora podcast leader, made actually for the original Fedora podcast that essentially takes Pulse Audio, somebody needs to put it in a pipe wire and creates two recording streams, one for your microphone, one for your output device, and it records the call and you. So I have two recordings of myself, one is a backup and then one recording of the interviewee or whoever else is on the call. And then most of the time I ask the interviewee if they feel comfortable recording themselves, which they usually do because we're in Fedora, most people here are fairly technical. So we have that on their end. And then Edward of course records himself on Audacity or whatever. And what hardware do you utilize? Microphone, computer, and what OS are you running right now? So I have a fairly entry level as good microphones go microphone. This is called the Samsung Q2U, it was recommended to me by Michael and it's like $100, it's a stage mic, but it's really good and I really like it. You can get it pretty cheap. Depending on the time of the year, whatever their sales for that mic, you can get as low as 50 bucks sometimes. It's a very good microphone for its cost. So it's basically the go-to starter mic in my opinion because it is a very high quality mic but the price doesn't push it into the realm of ridiculous. Like my setup is a little bit more but I started a while back. Yeah, he started with an even lower quality mic. I started with worse. Upgraded to a really high quality mic which is his the road pod mic. Edward uses a microphone that's extremely similar to this, slightly more expensive. It's called the Audio Technica, something or other. I don't actually know but it's basically just this mic from another company. Hardware wise, I'm not high-end enough to have any like editing hardware. I just have my mouse and my laptop and this laptop is a Tuxedo or a 15 which is just kind of a basic laptop. It doesn't do anything extremely special. And OS, I'm running Fedora, of course, Fedora KDE spin right now. Same, also Fedora KDE. Yay. I think we answered all the questions. Yeah, those were some good questions. Well, it's technically my talk, so it's a good thing. Oh yeah, I'm just saying it makes it easy for me. I like not having to be the person who's the runner of the show. It's really nice. Yes, Matthew, soon for Jitsie. As soon as Red Hat buys that matrix server. Come on. Looking forward to meet that FedoraProject.org slash bar. Yeah, that's a good thing. I want that. Yeah, we already have a Fedora podcast planning room which is just for planning out the Fedora podcast and sharing anything that's like a spoiler if we want to not spoil everyone in the main Fedora podcast chat about what's coming up soon. Which we do use, we do actually do a fair amount of planning in the main room. We just like to keep spoilers out of there. And whenever we get our own matrix server, we'll transfer the room over and then have a Jitsie room built into the planning room. So we can just go straight from the text chat to the video chat and record. Your camera is a little bit messed up. It's not displaying anymore. But we do have an interesting question. It works on my end. Yeah, I don't know what to say. But it could be just me. There is an interesting question in the Q&A says, how do you approach prepping for and executing on a podcast episode? That is a very big question right there. It is. So the planning and executing workflow, I would say goes something like this. So the way we do podcasts most of the time is kind of unlike a lot of podcasts where they just like get together, intro, go, interview, go, whatever else, go, outro, go. For instance, like Michael's shows go that way. But the federal podcast, what we tend to do is we pick a main topic that the episode is and that's not episode based. That's topic based. So for instance, the latest episode with the i3 spin, we were like, well, we wanna interview the i3 spin. They're doing cool work. They're brand new. Let's do this. So we reached out to them, picked a date, picked a time. We got on a Zoom, or a Jitsie call and then recorded that. And beforehand, we had written show notes. We've got a HackMD team that we read all our show notes on and we kind of draft the show notes in the Pagger ticket and then copy them over into HackMD for more intensive editing. Then we just go through those show notes and chat with the team about them. After we're done with that, we take those recordings and I edit them just for the interview to get that sounding good. Then we wait till when we think we want to release that. So how the i3 spin one went was we were like, well, we've got nothing else lined up for this week and the i3 spin episode is really good. Let's go ahead and do that. So we figure out what we're gonna be talking about. In this case, it was just i3. And then I record the intro and outro. Sometimes it's me, sometimes it's Edward. That episode, I was gonna do it. So I did that. I recorded a little bit of news about Nest. I spliced that all together, edited it and then put it on the queue to release. Wrote the show notes. So that's roughly the workflow of making an episode. Michael, I cannot hear you. Oh, I must have muted just then. That was really interesting because I, the way you described it is really cool because I especially like the Pagger system that's being utilized to being able to have great people see it as it's starting and the different pieces together and the different groups and interviews that you're doing. So when I first saw that, it made me really excited to participate because there's so many things you can see as it's going that I even watched the Fedora podcast project on Pagger to see what's all happening. And if you wanna participate in the show, people, you should just go to the Pagger, sign up. And if you don't have an account, of course you probably already do, but if you don't sign up and start contributing there because it's a lot of interesting stuff, even just saying how it's all put together is really cool. Yeah, one thing that we did with this podcast that's really unusual in the podcasting world is we made an open source podcast in the sense that, well, the source itself isn't actually open because we keep our interviews and all that private just to not give anyone spoilers. In the end, they're all released and so everyone can see them. But then the issues and everything are all out in the public. The plans are all out in the public. Ideas all out in the public. Like what Michael just said, he kept an eye on it through the Pagger. That is exactly how everyone else can. Our network partner keeps an eye on what we're doing through the same way everyone else can. So it's a very open show. That's an interesting way to put it. I was just, I meant that I'm interested in seeing what's happening, not necessarily that I'm keeping an eye on it from the network side. Okay, maybe an eye on it is about like you, the way that we communicate with you about what we're doing as someone like who we work with is the same way as a random person is. Oh yeah, for sure. We keep everything very open. Yeah, I like the transparent approach. It's really interesting. Matthew, thanks for the offer about more hardware but it's a big leap to go from my laptop on my mouse to like anything bigger. So unless you wanna dump $200 on me and get me a really good audio setup, I think I'm good for now. What video editing software do we use? We do not edit in videos right now but when I do edit video for Fedora, like I did a sponsor talk for Academy 2021 that was edited in KIN Live. KIN Live is awesome. Maybe we could do video in the Fedora podcast someday but audio podcasts are a million times easier than video podcasts. Yes, very true. I do two podcasts that have video elements. I would not suggest doing video elements when you get started with a podcast because you're basically adding a lot more work because a lot of people don't think about the fact that when you're doing video editing, you are also doing audio editing too. So you have to do all the post processing on the audio that you were gonna do anyway. So it's not just like it's a different component, it's double the work minimum. Double minimum and also audio is like a bit of work for the, is some work for my computer to do because it has to go through all the audio, apply all the effects I wanna do. And then with video, it's like the process or the intensity of editing audio times three on my CPU. So my fans are just going full speed the whole time. It takes four times as long to render. Yeah, it's just not ready to do video yet. Someday though. Someday maybe. I do not need $100 yet. It's not that level yet. I've only released six episodes. Open process. I like that open process podcast. Yeah, so. One million dollars. Yeah, thank you guys for all coming. This was a fun talk to give. It's actually my second talk ever. So if I didn't do great, I'm sorry, but I tried. I think you did great. Especially for your second try. Also, Michael, I just checked. I did give you the footer podcast contributor badge. Yes. I'm glad. I didn't even check, so I'm glad you did. I was going through after the thing. So you beat me to it. I like it. I have to make sure I'm not slipping on my badge giving.