246 – Organising The IDEMS Podcast

[00:00:06] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with Kate Fleming, one of the directors of IDEMS.

Hi, Kate.

[00:00:18] Kate: Hey, Santiago, how are you?

[00:00:20] Santiago: I’m very well, thank you. I think this is our very first episode together, just the two of us.

[00:00:26] Kate: I think so too, it seems weird that that’s the case because we do talk about the podcast a lot, but I don’t think we have talked about the podcast on a podcast, which is why we’re doing what we’re doing today.

[00:00:39] Santiago: Yeah, it brings ideas of Russell’s paradox and all sorts of things, a self-referencing episode. 

[00:00:46] Kate: The meta, yes, it’s a podcast about podcasts.

[00:00:50] Santiago: Yes, but there’s some exciting work that’s been happening, and I believe it will help us show a bit of a method to the madness that is the IDEMS podcast, because it looks like madness, but it’s not actually.

[00:01:08] Kate: Yes. That has been a lot of what we have been thinking about. So, this all started as an exercise of how we bring order to the chaos of the podcast, recognising that there has been a method to our madness. And we started in what felt like relative madness because we just started with the idea that we needed a podcast microsite. And then that sent us down the path of thinking about tagging, about thinking about various things.

[00:01:33] Santiago: Sorry to interrupt. I think that there’s a layer before that to the madness, which is that we thought we needed a podcast in the first place. And we got this podcast up and running because we wanted to tell IDEMS’ story and it became much more than that. We have loads of different episodes about a lot of our work, and it goes well beyond the IDEMS story in some ways. And I think that’s what caused perhaps the perceived disorganisation of the episodes, which is what we’re trying to resolve.

[00:02:13] Kate: Well, I think it became a repository for thinking, it’s a good ground for, well, this is a topic we have been in conversation about, this is something we’re working on, this is a case study. There are all these different things where we realised, okay, this is the channel, the medium we’re using right now to tell those stories.

And so I think it evolved into something much more robust that, you know, it’s like a hydra, it has all these different heads that have come out of what was originally, something that was probably relatively constrained. It started before my time, but yes.

[00:02:46] Santiago: Except that in this hydra heads keep growing without cutting any of them.

[00:02:53] Kate: Well, I think we’ve realised that the heads don’t keep growing, and we can get more into this. I think we did realise that there are constrained and finite heads. It’s just that we needed to define things, we needed to make that clear to other people. We even needed to create some bounds for our team as well, so that they have those frames in mind as they’re having conversations.

Because a lot of times it’s implicit or it’s just like the water in which we swim, but no one has necessarily articulated something, or David has thought about something, I’ve thought about something, we’ve thought more strategically about things, but that isn’t necessarily captured in a single podcast conversation.

So I guess to come back to where we were, yes, the podcast served this core purpose, and then it’s evolved. Well now we have, I think you just told me there are 245 episodes, this will be our 246th, it’s become very clear that we need not even just a page for the podcast or some portal to the podcast, we really need a microsite for the podcast. It has its own identity, it has its own life. I think we recognise that we need to help people access it, that just to go down the journey, if somebody just presents you with 246 podcasts, that just feels daunting, you don’t know where to start, you can’t do much with it.

[00:04:17] Santiago: And as well, so many different heads in the hydra, I can’t imagine any member of the audience we have being interested in all 246 episodes. They’re so varied in nature and topic and theme that being able to find what you really are interested in and listening to what you want to find out about within our thinking, within our strategy, within our opportunities, that can be quite a challenge when you have just a list of 246 episodes with their descriptions.

[00:04:53] Kate: And I think there is also the issue that you might not know you’re interested in an issue. I would say this is my journey as a human being. I did not start thinking I was interested in social impact tech. Often you start through the lens of, I’m interested in education, I’m interested in responsible AI, it’s something.

And then as you start down the journey you realise, oh, this actually relates to quite wonky data science issues, or difficult issues about governance, you start to see that there are all of these things that have a relation to something you do care about. But if you’d started with data science, one’s eyes might have glazed over, but once you get into the topic, you can suddenly think this is actually really interesting, I’d never thought about the fact that this is actually a statistics problem.

Whatever the issue is, we did recognise we have to help people, not make it feel overwhelming. And so really the exercise we went through was: what does it look like to have a microsite for this, and then how do we organise that microsite? So you get to the IDEMS website and then you get to this dedicated mini site experience for the podcast.

That was our first process of how we organise this for your new listener who wants to find something in particular, to show often that our team has interest too. So we talked about how we showcase our team’s relationship to the podcast, that certain people might have preferred podcasts, favorite podcasts, and have a set of things that they’re interested in. And then the really hard problem is: how do we tag and organise episodes so that they become findable, discoverable, searchable, all of those different things. 

[00:06:33] Santiago: To bring it a bit more concretely, there are three things that we are trying to achieve with this. The perhaps most challenging one is the tagging or filtering system that we’re trying to implement. You, Johnny and myself have been working on this for a while, and essentially what I see is a way of filtering down through sort of tags. They’re not quite tags in the usual sense, we’re calling them tags, but we have three or four to be defined categories of keywords, key phrases, and you could then select from each category which ones of those you’re interested in, and then get a sub list of the episodes that we have that correspond to those elements of each category.

[00:07:50] Kate: Yes, and I think part of what was important to us in setting up that structure was taking a step back and thinking about what IDEMS is, what is our value proposition, what differentiates us, what strategically are we doing? Often this gets back to chaos, it can feel like chaos, but we understand that there are these pieces that weave together to form the impact solutions with communities, with experts, that scale, all of these different issues across global variability, where you’re creating sustainable, inclusive impact.

And so that exercise of capturing that, holding space for a lot, but not overwhelming people. Because I think when we started – and I think this is often the case for tagging – you have this tag cloud where you have a hundred tags, and it can become like the historic days of blogging when you would land on someone’s blog and there’s just this massive tag cloud and you’re like, ugh, I don’t even know what to do with it. And there’s usually some tag that is tagged a hundred times, and then all these other tags that just get tagged a couple of times. And it doesn’t actually help you navigate in any particular way. It’s just like, okay, good to know that’s about that. I’ll click on that and see what comes up.

So I think we were conscious that we wanted it to be more useful. We wanted it to align with our strategic vision as IDEMS, with our value proposition. We definitely wanted to hold space for different audiences, are you a technologist, are you someone who works in a non-profit, are you an academic, are you someone on the ground, are you a small holder farmer in Niger? I would like you to be able to access this too, and feel like you could find your way into it. So we wanted to think about all those different audiences and the different ways in for those different audiences.

[00:09:50] Santiago: And I think that’s where the different categories come in quite well. We have a category that is perhaps the most standard one on the “subject area”.

[00:10:01] Kate: Which I have renamed, by the way, “subject/impact area”, because I think we’re quite aware that that’s the space of the actual social impact. If you were measuring on the ground “did this have an effect?”, you would be looking in this category: education, climate, public health, issues like that, even responsible AI, I think we decided it was a category.

[00:10:25] Santiago: I believe so. I haven’t got the updated list in front of me, so I can’t confirm or deny.

[00:10:32] Kate: We did. I’m looking at it, we decided on artificial intelligence, although I would say in our case, it’s almost always responsible AI. Except we do just talk sometimes about AI. I just listened to an episode to tag it, which was with David and Lily talking about demystifying AI. So it was really just an explainer about the field, about the state of the field, about where we’ve been, where we’re going, all of that.

[00:10:57] Santiago: Yeah, and AI was mentioned as well in the sense of how can we integrate components of AI into certain products that we’re developing? So looking at STACK in the future, for example. So I wouldn’t necessarily say that that fits directly into responsible AI, even though we are considering responsible ways to do so, but it’s not about the responsible use of AI, but AI more broadly.

[00:11:26] Kate: I would say if we’re looking at AI, we’re always thinking about how to responsibly design, use it. I don’t think there’s any lane that we consider…

[00:11:34] Santiago: But for the sake of tagging, for filtering, it’s not about necessarily the responsible use within the episode, the theme itself would be AI.

[00:11:46] Kate: Fair, yes. Okay.

[00:11:47] Santiago: Anyway, we’re getting drawn into detail. 

[00:11:50] Kate: But this is actually a good representation of the conversations that you, Johnny and I had, where we hashed through a lot and we went wrong, we stepped wrong a few times where we realised, ooh, that doesn’t work, this is getting confusing. I think that helped us refine our categories.

Just to come back to the high level categories, we have the “impact area or subject” that we’re focused on, we have the “IDEMS”, kind of us as an organisation, something related to us within it, and then we have a third category, which is the actual innovation, I would say our category broadly is “sociotechnical innovation”.

So we’re not always looking at innovation as a technology solution. In fact, we’re often not. It’s something that’s at the intersection of people and how they use technology or how they get value out of technology. But there’s often innovation in enabling people to better use technology or derive value or bring a community into participation with a program, anything like that.

So those are our three categories, and I would give as an example why we ended up with those categories. We went down the path of the two things that stand out for me most that are education and governance. Education, we saw that it was a subject area, but it’s also often an innovation for us, where we are training – research methods support is all about training farmers to be involved in research and how they’re doing work that benefits them. And so that’s an overlap.

And then also we struggled at times with governance, which could have all kinds of things. I think we didn’t include it as a subject, we ended up not doing that. But there’s governance of IDEMS and then there’s innovation in governance, like designing systems where you can have multiple participants in how something is governed, so you have accrediting standards, and then you might have a local community that also has some governance or participation in how they deploy something and adapt it for their local context.

[00:13:57] Santiago: And that’s why we call it distributed governance.

[00:14:00] Kate: Yes, yes. And it let us refine our terms a bit more once we broke things out that way.

So I know this probably, if you’re listening, sounds really wonky, really in the weeds, but I think it is that idea of how does something become useful? And I think it’s not useful to land on something about distributed governance when you’re thinking like, oh, I wonder how the social enterprise, IDEMS, is handling the fact that it’s a community interest company and they’re having to navigate whatever the realities of governing a business are when we are in this odd social enterprise category.

[00:14:37] Santiago: And that’s an example of the broad idea that we have behind all this, how can we enable a specific person to find a shortish list of episodes within their interest areas. That is the overall objective of this tag system, or filtering system, that we’re trying to get to. And I suspect it is going to change, it is going to evolve, we are continually evolving as one of our principles. We’ll have to learn from using it, and I’m even trying to train a chatbot, an AI chatbot to help us with the tagging because tagging 246 episodes that have already been published is a monumental task.

[00:15:30] Kate: Yes. And I will say, as you mentioned principles, we did have that as a category, we started with the idea that our principles, the IDEMS principles – feel free to listen to all, however many podcasts there are about the principles, which is its own tagging exercise – would be one category, but we realised, oh, it’s actually not that useful because really everything we do ends up touching our principles, so it’s not very useful.

That was definitely something we struggled with, there were things that were aligned with our thinking, with our mission, with our values, but they weren’t actually useful to someone who’s coming in and trying to discover things.

And I guess one other thought as we’re talking about this, is that we were just so aware we wanted to continue to hold space for so many diverse topics, perspectives, and so many avenues of conversation in the podcast. How do we make our topics precise enough that they’re helpful but not too precise so that they’re constraining? So that our team doesn’t feel like, “oh, I guess we’re not talking about that issue on the podcast”, which is certainly never the case, it’s pretty much if anyone has something they wanna talk about, it’s fair game.

[00:16:48] Santiago: In line with that, it brings me to another area that we are thinking of for this microsite, which is our favorite episodes. And one of my favorite episodes is something that has nothing to do with IDEMS, it’s one that I believe Johnny did with David about an article that he had read on how China is reclaiming deserts through the solar panel farms, that installing solar panel farms has made vegetation grow in places where it had stopped growing years and years ago.

It does have things to do with IDEMS vaguely. It would be quite difficult to tag that one, I’m looking forward to that challenge, but it is also a way of saying we are real people as well, and we have our interests and we find things exciting and we talk about them in the podcast as well.

[00:17:47] Kate: And I think that’s a good point because I would say one of the nicest things about working at IDEMS is how curious and constantly kind of learning, exploring our team is. And so, if the podcast didn’t hold space for that… In fact, I think Johnny has been one of the best at introducing those just interesting topics. I know he talked about DeepSeek, he talked about Solarpunk. Just innovative ways of thinking or new ideas or a challenger, just something that kind of throws a variable in the mix. 

[00:18:20] Santiago: I remember in the first few months of the podcast, we even talked about nepotism within organisations, which is something that I brought up as, oh, okay, this sounds a bit like nepotism in what we are doing in collaboration with INNODEMS, hang on a second, let’s revise what nepotism does to organisations as well.

[00:18:42] Kate: Well, I think it shows that when you’re working in impact, when you’re working in so many variable contexts, there are all kinds of issues that arise. If you want something to work well in a local context, you might need to recognise that there’s something that makes a program or social intervention work well in a context because you are working with just the realities as opposed to you’re trying to force everyone and shoehorn everyone into, well, this is our worldview, this is how this should work, nepotism is always bad and it’s against our policy to use it. And then maybe we don’t access something that we needed to access.

And maybe also, and I think that came up in that conversation, I think David made the point of, well, it’s not always bad, sometimes it serves a purpose that’s actually useful. And so if you have very just sort of binary black and white views, sometimes you’d be missing the nuance of a particular issue.

[00:19:40] Santiago: Indeed. But, going back to our favorite episode, that’s the second aspect that we are trying to implement. It’s showing that, as you were saying, we do have quite a lot of curiosities and interests within the team. We’re very similar in many ways, but very different in others. And being able to highlight some people’s favorite episodes, favorite conversations that we published, I think it’s a really nice way into the podcast for potential listeners. Oh, I’ve interacted a bit with Santiago, let’s have a look at what he thinks is the most interesting episode. 

[00:20:23] Kate: Also, it gives you insight into our team because I think what people pick is revealing of just what they’re most interested in, what fires their curiosity, or even what makes them a good fit for IDEMS because they’re interested in some particular lane of our work.

[00:20:42] Santiago: Yes, and it is funny that I work so much in education and the one I would choose is not about education at all. 

[00:20:49] Kate: It’s funny, I just listened to a demystifying AI one, it reminded me like, oh, something I really enjoy, there are downsides to it as well, but it is working with the team that really understands this technology. I’m often in non technologist conversations where I hear people just spouting lines they’ve heard on podcasts, or whatever it is, and then to sit with our team and be able to get quite thoughtful, quite critical, what’s the hype, what’s the reality?

 I think I would get sucked into, and I hear other people do so, something which is like, “oh my God, AI is just there, it’s done, this is the future.” And then it’s like, “well, no, we’re still working fundamentally with the same core AI that was three years ago, it’s getting smarter, it’s getting better, but we haven’t had that next big breakthrough”. I was like, “oh, all right, that’s helpful in my thinking about things and ways that I don’t think I would’ve thought”. Yeah, it comes into my thinking and I find it useful.

[00:21:54] Santiago: Yes. And working with people like that and building from that particular episode, that demystifying AI is part of a collection of episodes, which brings me to the third element of the microsite that we’re thinking about, which is sort of miniseries or a mini collection of episodes that relate to each other that may or may not have a specific order to listen. And it tells a wider story. We have, I think, one instance only where we have four episodes that are clearly part one, part two, part three, part four. Otherwise we have a few that are part one, part two, and we have a few that are responses to a particular episode.

But this is a way in which I or Johnny or yourself or anyone interested within IDEMS or – I’d love to see – an audience member could bring a collection of episodes that they particularly liked to listen to together. But it’s a way of saying, okay, yes, we managed to tell a bit of a story within one episode, but there’s much more to the story, we actually have several episodes that tell that story as a collection of episodes much better.

[00:23:22] Kate: In that as well is a curation where someone could end up piecing together a quite distinct story because they see a through line to podcasts that I might listen to and think they’re totally unrelated and somebody else is thinking, oh, those are all very specifically, you know, the common theme here is, I don’t know, working in West Africa versus East Africa, or secondary education versus, whatever the topic is. You could find a way to kind of piece things together in a way that makes someone see things differently than they might if they just listened and took something at face value.

[00:24:02] Santiago: Yeah, and one of the things that I’m most excited about our work at the moment is the textbooks project in Kenya, and there’s about five or six episodes now that talk about textbooks. And listening to any individual one of those episodes would just give you a fraction of the story. But the curated list, as you said, of six episodes, five episodes, however many they are, I still haven’t put it together, that list would help anyone listening to those episodes in that particular order that I would suggest. It would help understand really the depth and complexity of the problem that we’re trying to address.

[00:24:46] Kate: Even as you’re saying that, our long-term vision, and we are building it incrementally, is that the podcast starts to get linked up to other website pages, other forms of documents. Like if someone’s written an article or they published a paper, or if we have a case study, that could be linked and you’d start to have a more coherent vision, see connection.

And also so that you don’t have to solve everything in one place. I think right now there’s a lot of weight carried by the podcast where you could imagine like, “oh, I can just listen to a story about the textbooks”. But now I can also go and look at the pitch deck about that work, about open educational resources, and where this fits in and why this is actually really part of our big vision, not one strain of work that we’re doing.

[00:25:36] Santiago: It is just one more mechanism to tell our story. Which is back to the beginning. So yeah, it’s very exciting to be able to talk about podcasts in a podcast, and hopefully we’ll have this microsite up and running in a few weeks, maybe months.

[00:25:54] Kate: No, the goal is to have it done by our team meeting, which is in three weeks. So it might be a bare bones version of it. It might not be robustly designed, but I think if we have the basics and then we have a bit of text to fill in or a bit more tagging to do, I think that’s fine, it gets us nearly there.

[00:26:17] Santiago: Yeah, so exciting. Stay tuned and we’ll probably have another episode once we manage to implement it and see how it’s going.

[00:26:30] Kate: And I have no idea how we’re gonna tag this episode. I’ll leave that challenge to you.

[00:26:36] Santiago: Yes. That will be an interesting one. Well, thank you very much, Kate.

[00:26:41] Kate: Thanks, Santiago.