What are the benefits of willing listeners eager to contribute? In Ep#51 we're going to compare the similar ethos between OS/V4V, how to properly acknowledge volunteers and a focus on the talent of the 3T's.
Huge thanks to Sam Sethi & Steve Webb for supporting the show. Every contribution counts!
15% of this episode is going to Steven Crader for his documentation and rock solid work in improving podcasting.
Handy links:
Revolution OS Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c
Boostagram Numerology Github: https://github.com/Podnews-LLC/boostagram-numerology/tree/main
Value 4 Value Support:
Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/support
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast
Connect With Kyrin/Mere Mortals:
Website: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReU
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspods
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcasts
Huge thanks to Sam Sethi & Steve Webb for supporting the show. Every contribution counts!
15% of this episode is going to Steven Crader for his documentation and rock solid work in improving podcasting.
Handy links:
Revolution OS Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw8K460vx1c
Boostagram Numerology Github: https://github.com/Podnews-LLC/boostagram-numerology/tree/main
Value 4 Value Support:
Boostagram: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/support
Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/meremortalspodcast
Connect With Kyrin/Mere Mortals:
Website: https://www.meremortalspodcast.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/jjfq9eGReU
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/meremortalspods
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meremortalspodcasts/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@meremortalspodcasts
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
What are the benefits of willing listeners eager to contribute? So welcome everyone to another episode of the Value for Value show. My name is Kyrin. Host of the Mere Mortals podcast. The Mere Mortals book Reviews, but also this show, which is for digital content creators and those who are willing wanting to connect deeper with their audience and also monetise their products, perhaps in the way that is a little bit outside of the ordinary. Not using the paywall option of Patreon and not using the option of advertising, but using value for value, which is essentially getting support from your listeners who are willing and eager to contribute to you.
So yes indeed, the topic for today we're going to be talking about and today I am recording on the 27th of September 2023. I do these live as well, so I always appreciate if you want to come join with that. There's some details in the show notes about that. And today we're going to be talking about the open source revolution that's upon us. So what is this concern and why is this related to value for value? So I'm actually relatively new to open source. And I'll go more into the, I suppose, definition of that shortly. But I've I've always been a rather non-technical person.
And so now all of these things about open source software and debugging and namespaces and things like this, I've always really struggled. When I first started interacting with it, I really struggled to understand. And so basically open source is creating software code which is available to the public and anyone can contribute to it. And, and it is free in the sense of freedom, not necessarily in the sense of the actual software is free. And or at least there's it's you can monetise around it. And so they'll be talking a little bit about the history of this.
I'm going to go over some of the reasons why I think the ethos of the open source community is very similar to value for value as well as just talking about why people contribute. And we'll look at the talent part of the three TS as well. So podcasting 2.0 was my real introduction to the open source community and doing things out in the open. And it was really interesting to me and I found myself diving further into it and learning more about the ethos. This was at the same time I was learning about value for value and meant I really have dived in. I've almost did my first pull request recently.
I was trying to update the update the boost agram number numerology and I was which James Cridland actually owns on a on a GitHub. I didn't manage to do it, but I will do that shortly afterwards. But open source actually affects quite a few people and it almost certainly has affected you. So if you have ever used Mozilla Firefox, if you've ever used office, if you've ever use the VLC media player, if you've ever used a laptop with IP on it or python or shortcut KANU blend, what else do we have? Apache web, The audacity. And of course I mentioned Linux and which is basically on every Android phone.
So if you've ever touched an Android phone, you have used some open source software. At some point and you'd never really notice this. And it's it's kind of hidden in the background a lot of the times, which is sort of what I think Visa V is going to become at times. It's you'll have this ability to to connect with your audience and you won't know all of the things about Bitcoin that's going on behind the surface, which is happening with a lot of these podcasting 2.0 apps and you won't know exactly how it works. All you know is, Oh, I got a message directly from someone and there was a value of money attached to it.
Wow, that was super cool. Or Oh, this person reached out to me and they left a really nice comment. And, you know, it's because it doesn't have all of the spam type behaviour, which you'll see on YouTube comments. It's actually a valuable comment, something that was worthwhile and interesting and intriguing. And if you want to know more about these, go back to the previous episodes on Boost aGrams and the streaming of stats and things like that, which you could find earlier in the season in episodes 43 and 44. So we can see, okay, there's open sources is upon us.
We're encountering it every day. How does this actually relate to value for value and why? Why are they similar? So I'm going to go over a couple of properties here, which I have done in my bit of research over this past week because I didn't really know much about the history of it. And it's it's actually pretty fascinating going into it. And what really helped me was this documentary called Revolution OS, which was a documentary, and a lot of it showcases the the starting of how people were using software. This is basically like the geeks and the nerds. And when they were first creating software, it was in this open environment.
No one had passwords on their laptops and they because they would just or on their computers, I guess you'd call them back then and they because there was no need to everyone was just would just contribute. And even when they did set it up, one of the guys, Richard Stallman, who I'll talk more about shortly, would just hack into the database and then find everyone's password and then email and be like, Hey, just so you know, like your password is blah, blah, blah. But it's much easier to just press the into button because obviously it's tongue in cheek because he's he's saying saying and showing how the ability to share software just because you have a password one doesn't mean it's necessarily secure.
And it's a kind of a barrier to the ethos of of sharing publicly. So open source code and this is just a reading here from a little website, open source code is usually stored in a public repository and shared publicly. Anyone can access the repository to use the code independently or contribute improvements to the design and functionality of the overall project. So we can see that okay, having a password is not helping, that it's actually a hindrance to people coming in. And so there was this thing called the Free Software movement, which was started by this guy Richard Stallman.
And free actually in this case doesn't refer to price Free is very much about the liberty to access the code to change it for anyone to have access to it. And if you go and learn more about the free software movement, he's kind of got these principles which he lays out and they're very much related to liberty and personal choice and things like this. And essentially it's the ability to change, adapt, use or not use without restrictive IP and licensing. And so I think coined this term the copyleft instead of the copyright, which is the and this is coming from that documentary, a, quote, inalienable right to cooperate with other people and form a community.
And so that was from this guy, Richard Stallman, the Free software Movement founder. And I think this is exactly what is happening with values in value music. For example, if you look at the adaptability of of what's happening, someone is putting up their music, for example, and once again, go back to some of the previous episodes where I talked about value for value music and how this operates. So this is going back to episode 45 and 46. This is where you can see, okay, someone is putting up something they've created, so they've put in some hardware and created something and now they're putting it into an RSS feed and basically just saying if anyone wants to use this, adapt it, do what they want to it, they can please just give some accreditation.
And this is where it comes to the licensing sort of aspect, because with with this software, open source software, it usually comes with a distribution license and the license includes terms that define how developers can use study, modify and most importantly, distribute the software. So it's not necessarily free in the sense of you can do whatever you want with it, you can change it, not give accreditation to to the person who has created or steal it directly or things like this. There are a lot of nuances with this, which is exactly what is the same with V.
For V, it's a lot of nuance, but essentially what I see is it's very similar in that someone puts up a piece of software source code software, someone puts up some music, other people can see that adapt it, and so they can add lines that code and then they can either with with some of the licenses, some of them say if you change it enough, you need to then call it something different so that the original person is not getting, I guess, tainted with your with what you've changed to it because you could be putting malware into it and they don't want their name associated with that.
Or you could just be doing minor alterations to improve some bugs, which is, you know, a good thing. Value for value music if someone puts the music up and then I put it into a V for V Jace show. So this is like a value for value music show where I'm maybe talking over it, maybe I've done like a couple of scratches, maybe I'm jumping in and out and being like, Yeah, here comes the bang. A part 2 to 2. Obviously you're changing the music. You're adapting it because you're adding your extra audio on top of it, or perhaps you've done a remix or something like this, but we can see, okay, this is it's the same ethos.
Someone's putting something up and just saying, Hey, I've created this thing, why don't you use it? You can adapt it, you can do these things to it. And obviously there's going to be some nuances. And I would actually imagine if value for value music kind of gets as big as I think it's going to get, there's probably going to need to be some licenses and different types of licenses. Oh yeah, You can use it in this sense or you can only use it if you're including me as a 90% split or my value block, as is 90% of it. So I get 90% of any income coming in from people listening to your show, which is it?
Using my music. So I think this has got a very similar use case of value for value. And I do the same with my show here. Like I put it out there, if anyone wants to create clips from it, if they want to adapt it, do anything they want to it, that's awesome. If they want to rip off the entire show and then put it on Spotify. Yeah, okay. I'm not happy with that person. Hey. And so this is where it's like, yeah, there is some boundary points that can be crossed, but once again, the nuances, it's the, the spirit behind it of, of sharing things publicly.
And I think that's a very noble ambition and something that actually in the best in the long term actually distributes things, makes it more widely available. So another point here, which we have is contribution. So open source is all about others contributing to make it better. And this can be done on a somewhat voluntary basis or they can be compensated for it. So, you know, no financial gain or they actually have some. And we can see this in in various aspects, various aspects of value for value as well. Alex Gates, for example, he contributed the topic for this week.
He was the one who suggested I do open source software or open source and on the value for value show and how that relates to value for value. And you know, that was a great suggestion because I probably wouldn't have done that without him. I wouldn't have done the research to do this very show without him, him saying that. And so then looking at that and then saying, okay, you know, I do something similar with the value for value splits as well with this very show. So if you look into the the value block for this, you'll see I've got two which are at 1%, one is for the blue spot by C Dubs and another is by the fountain blue spot, which is just a service that I add on to this because I find it beneficial.
It's surface boostagrams in a way that I personally can't do and highlights them in a different way. And I'm willing to compensate people for that and they just ask that they get put into the splits. And this is very much how open source software works as well. People contribute, they make things better, and then they're not trying to lock down the software itself. Anyone can get access to it, but it does take effort, time to learn these things and you can make it easier. Yeah, sure. I'll come to your workplace and I'll help install it for you. I'll train up your staff so they know how to use the Linux operating system or Debian or whatever it is that they're running on their particular computers and servers.
And so I think this aspect of contribution is very much important to do value for value as well. Someone can help contribute to this show in in various different ways and I'll talk more about that at the end in this case, we've seen that Fountain and C Dubs have done it through a software as a service sort of way. They've created something I could never create. I don't know how to code, I don't know how to do these things, and I'm compensating them for that. And then Alex Gates or Sir Alex Gates has contributed to this show by giving me a topic which I wouldn't have thought about otherwise, but I'm not going to compensate for this one.
And so you can kind of see there's these these two aspects which are very, very much similar with them, open source. And so, yeah, very, very interesting to to see that kind of parallel there. Another one is transparency, and you can actually make a better product when anyone can view all the bugs messiness and how the sausage is made. And so in this revolutionary documentary it was talking about this guy called Eric Rayment, who sort of honestly is probably like it's kind of similar to me in that he's kind of like a little bit of a philosopher whilst also trying to do practical things.
And so he wrote this manifesto, I guess you'd call it, called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and it was basically a a document, a paper that he wrote, which is sort of in a book form as well, talking about how he was arguing in this, that by creating using open source and having people coming in to the actual code itself, you're getting more eyes on it, you're getting more people looking at it, you're getting more people fixing it as compared to a company with closed software who only have a limited number of developers and they have to be, you know, they're on a time schedule.
They're on a pay. If they don't get paid, they're not going to be working on it. And he was just essentially saying that in the long run, actually open sourcing your code does create a better product because you have more people doing this. And I believe the same applies to to content creation. When you start having ads and sponsors entering the picture, I think this starts to shift. I think your products that you're creating becomes diluted. And this is not a new observation. People over the many years have talked about how, you know, art becomes mainstream or commercialised and then it's it loses that essence that made it this underground thing that was so vibrant, so passionate, so interesting and unique.
And then it it becomes mainstream. It becomes, you know, kind of corrupted by all of the influences of people saying, Oh, you should probably not talk about this on this show. You might not want to do this. And it's not like it ruins it necessarily, but the misaligned incentives that we were talking about from the last episode, I think to start to crop up, you see on the open source side of things or on the business side of things, of software, if something is closed source, you tend to get these monopolies looking at you, Microsoft or this locked in behaviour where you you offer it to someone and then it becomes an integral part of the of the company that is using the software.
And then you start not supporting previous versions. So they have to upgrade and then you're, you've got kind of like poor customer support because they don't have any other option. They have to use you. So if you only want to hire five customer support people when you really need ten, well it's like, well, too bad you just going to have to deal with that company because you're locked in. And in all of these cases, it's creating a worse product for the person who wants to use it in the software side of things. And I mean personally, my belief is that the more ads you start to add in, the more sponsors, the more outside influences that you have on your show probably are going to have this type of behaviour where it is locking you in, where you are doing things that I think just create a worse product.
And so having this transparency of, look, this is how I do the value for value. So you can see exactly who is influencing me and how much they're influencing me because I read out all the boostagrams and because I acknowledge the support. And in this case, if I do start talking about this particular topic, you know, it's it's because either I want to or because I've been influenced in a way which you can see it's the kind of things hidden behind the surface, which are the leads to worse outcomes, I personally believe. So we've got the adaptability, we've got the contribution, we've got the transparency.
And then the far final one here was the meritocracy. And so only the software that people want and adopt and adopt will actually survive long term. So just because something is open source doesn't mean it's good. You know that there's plenty of bugs, there's plenty of things that make it kind of crappy. And it's it's very much if we look at podcasting 2.0, for example, if there wasn't a desperate need for from people like me who wanted to create a better product, who wanted to be able to connect with their audience in a in a more peer to peer manner, being able to do it through the actual podcasting apps themselves instead of having to direct them to go on to Instagram or go onto Facebook and do this thing and then connect with me there, I'm much it just makes so much more sense to be able to do it within the app.
Why can't we do it that way? Okay, well, we don't have all the infrastructure. A namespace sets of rules to for app developers to be able to do this. All right, let's let's do it. Let's create it. And that's exactly what Adam Curry and Dave Jones did. And you know, if people didn't want that, it wouldn't have taken off. It would have died on the vine. Podcasting, too, when I would have had 15 shows and then it would have been like, eh, nothing's really happening here. Okay, All right. Let's let's call it that. Instead, what has happened is there's been a super vibrant, vibrant community formed.
There's a lot of people working to create apps to talk about value for value. Me here, you know, there's people who are great at code, there's people who are great at advertising, there's people who are great at finding hidden podcasts. The Swedish tricolour, for example, there's people who are great at documentation, which is very necessary for developers to be able to use all sorts of things. We can see the so many people who want to contribute, who are willing to contribute, and it's the contribution that that provides the value, I guess, and the same sort of thing.
If you have a company, for example, that a show. So let's look at it. In this case, there's you've got a company that has created a service around some open source software. If the software is not getting picked up, if Linux was not being used, the companies that were created back in the day, I can't remember some of them from this Revolution documentary, they would have gone nowhere. They would have one was called Linux VA, for example. It had a big stock price thing, it iPod. And what you could kind of see was like it just kind of went down over time.
Now this was probably do a lot to the the dotcom bubble burst that that happened around that time. But there were other companies that did IPO red hot for example, which still exists to this day and is still thriving. And you know, it is related to the marketplace and not having monopolies or outside control on on a fair market, which typically tends to lead to to worse outcomes. So, for example, on the podcasting side of things, if you have a show by a company designed to sell a product, that's probably going to need some outside source of revenue to keep that show going.
So for example, let's just take Nike and they've got a podcast related to selling the newest Nike shoes, the newest Nike natural brand that's coming up. You're probably not going to want to use value for value. I'm not sure value for value will really work for a show like that because they've got a very explicit purpose of of selling you something. The I guess like the the show is it's more of a sales device rather than something which is designed to to bring value to the customers, to the the people listening to the podcast. It's it's actually more designed to take value from them.
It's trying to get them to to buy the newest piece of shoe or the newest shirt or something like that. And so in that case, it's it's more of a extractive value. So it probably needs I'm not sure value for value would work for a show like that. Whereas if you have other shows, hopefully like this one, which are trying to provide value in that sense and then just asking for value to be returned, you know, if, if I do the show for ten years and I it doesn't take off, people aren't getting value from it. You know, that's just the market. That's just like, all right, well, people actually didn't want what I'm creating here and they didn't value it enough.
And so the show goes away and, you know, there's no there's no problems with that. And I have no problems with the, you know, the Nike type podcast who are trying to sell things. That's just advertising, that's marketing. That's, you know, how you get a product out there. I just don't think that will work super successfully or would even work at all with value for value. And so when you've got this kind of meritocracy of the best software, it's open source, it's out there, anyone can use it and contribute. If people don't like that project, they're not going to contribute.
It dies on the vine, very similar to a show doing value for value. If it's a show which is providing value, it is making things better. People will contribute back to that. There's no doubt about that. And it's just how much. And if that will serve you over time as well, that kind of meritocracy, I think it will could almost call it the free market, if you want of value for value is sort of the free market. If if it's a if it's a crappy product, no one's listening, no one wants it, it's going to go away. And this is where, you know, the onus is on me to actually create something that's good.
I do hope that I create something which is valuable that helps people out. And so yeah, that's I suppose the four main aspects that I see for creating something, the, the ethos that is matched between value for value and open source before I get onto the Instagram lounge and I did want to make one more point about the incentives for contributing as well and a little story time here. So I do the minimalist podcast with my co-host one. We've been doing that for years now and have you know, we've gradually I've basically been showing him about the value for value, about podcasting, 2.0 open source, this sort of thing.
And we always are trying to come up with new ways for people to incentivise people to contribute to the show and to create more value for the show. And he was suggesting, like, Oh, okay, what if we do this thing for in October or Yeah, in October we do a pay back to listeners. So if someone boosts in a certain amount, well then put them in the value block for the next month and that way they'll be, it can be kind of like a game type of deal where if the more they contribute, the more they could get contributions from the past. And it's kind of like, you know, if you look at it that way, it's almost leading to the the the Ponzi economics style, you know, taking from others to pay back the original people.
And I was when he first suggested this, I was I was kind of off the bat like, I'm not not a big fan of that one because it does have that sort of feel of the taking from others to pay for the original people to then get them to, you know, and I it a lot of incentives and gamification is about just doing things to make people do things, even if it's not necessarily in their best interest or I mean, I guess you could say, you know, actually I'll take that back because who knows what's in someone's best interest if they want to play, spend their whole life playing video games, like please go at it.
Just be aware that that's what you're doing. You are spending your whole life playing video games, you know, 5 hours, 10 hours a game a day. And I look, I love it as well. I'm very fascinated by the history of Speedrunning. I watch videos on them all the time. And you know, there are people who will dedicate thousands of hours to just playing one level of a game over and over and over again. But in this case, I was going, yeah, I'm not I'm not so sure on that. I'm not too happy about that. And I couldn't exactly say why it was what in particular that that made me go, Yeah, but when I was thinking about this more, I realised what it was.
And so I'm going to actually give a suggestion here of some learning A I've taken from a podcast called Volunteer Technologist Spike Guy called Gene Liberman, and if you ever seen boosting around it's name is Gene Bean and he's got a few episodes out now, I think eight and he's got one coming out pretty soon with Mitch Downey, who is from Pod verse one of the apps I talk about regularly, who pod verse actually is open source. And he the Gene actually sent me that interview a little bit before it was released. Very much appreciate it for him to do that and what I've taken away from listening to his show.
And so his is all about volunteer technologists. It's people volunteering their time to create technology to help other people out. And so in this case, he was talking about how Mitch with Pod Verses was really interested in the accessibility aspect of the pod versus app of creating it so that it's helpful for people who do have accessibility problems, whether that be trouble seeing, whether that be trouble hearing, whether that be trouble, you know, in any of those sort of cases. So in this case, this is why transcripts were so important for for him and integrating that into pod verse.
And in general these people are not motivated by money. If you look at what's actually going on, why are they doing these things? Why are they creating, volunteering their time and they're not getting compensated? Obviously, that's the the whole aspect of volunteering. And so when it comes to the incentives for contribution, for open, open source, it's it's typically not money. It's or I would say it's probably, you know, 4% of people contribute to a show, probably 96% of people will contribute to open source or to a show, not for any financial aspect at all. So in this case, they're writing code.
They're doing it because they want this thing to succeed. And sure, they'll do some hours outside of it, though they'll share it with their friends. They will help a developer out. They'll be on the beta testing like I am for Fountain, and they will join the communities, they will participate, they'll do all of these things where it's there's nothing financial related to it. And if there is, it's like, Whoa, that was unexpected. I didn't I didn't know that would happen. And very much the same, I think, for for people contributing to a show that they don't want to get paid back in return, if someone's contributing to this very show, they're not contributing so that they can then get some money back in return.
They're contributing so that I can read out their name so that they feel good about contributing to to something of value. Because I am putting in a whole ton of work of watching these documentaries, creating the resources, doing all the links, the chapters, all of that sort of stuff. And it's they, they, they just, you know, they just want the name read out. They just want to feel good for themselves. They just want to create a connection with me because I'm awesome or you're nice. And so this is where I was like, okay, incentives wise as well.
It's probably not the best for, okay, let's if you if you contribute to this show, you're going to get this thing. And look, we do do that for the mere mortals, which this show is considered part of. If you contribute more than 100,000 sets, we will send you a miyamoto's t shirt. But it's like, you know that that's just basically an equivalency because 100,000 sets at the moment is about 40 AUD, which is about how much the shirts cost in the first place. So it's not like you're, you're coming out of this with anything in a financial aspect, but you do have, you know, my appreciation.
I send you a note now I send, you know, this shirt as well is a is a confirmation of that. You have contributed. It's it's like, you know, limited edition. So you get that aspect as well. There's all sorts of reasons why people contribute and most of it is not related to money. So when you think about the open source or whether you think about value for value, it is important to to have a deep think about, okay, why is someone actually contributing to this show? Is it because they want a financial return and some point in the future? No, it's probably not.
It's probably for other reasons and it's best to highlight those reasons and make them more available and widely known. So that was very, very cool. I'm going to now jump onto the Boosta Gram Lounge before we start talking about some tips and other things at the end. Welcome to the Value for Value. Boostagram Lounge. So the Boostagram Lounge for everyone who is wondering is the section where I read out the messages for people who have contributed to the show in a in a monetary form and thank them very much for that. It's the best way to do this is via a podcasting 2.0 app, and today I'll really highlight podcast because podcast is open source and you can go contribute to podcasts and you can also contribute to this show by sending in a boost.
A boost is a message that you send within the actual app, very much like how you would send a comments on a YouTube video. And when you send that message, it comes directly to me because all of the infrastructure and all things like that are set up with it and you can choose an amount to help support it. So we use Satoshis at this moment and there's all sorts of fun things you can do with the numerology, as you will see in the Graham numerology link, which I'll also put into the show notes. And so you can do things like like Ruby did last week with the 1770, 70,776, which is a big liberty boost and a whole bunch of people have contributed today.
So I can see right off the get go here that Sam Sethi was streaming and a lot of payments would say some somewhat coming through with this boostagram. So very much appreciated for that. Thank you very much. And also William Kenny. So that was really, really cool. And then the only other one I've actually gotten from this week was from the God caster himself, Steve Webb. Another episode Car and keep It Up. 17,777 So almost almost a big liberty boost will count that as one or two a stripe, a boost with an extra one at the front of it.
And he sent that in using fountain and you can actually go check out an episode I did talking about one of his shows called Life Spring Media in season two, which was episode number. Oh, let me just bring this up here in my upload. It shows season to episode number 22 last spring, Family Audio Bible. So very much appreciated. Thank you. Steve and Steve obviously enjoyed last week's episode, which was all about how does this time go so quickly? What was last week's episode about? Last week's episode was about the incentives of hosting and how everyone needs to win.
So thank you very much, Steve, for that. Once again, you can contribute in very many ways, and it's not just via Boostagrams, but I really do appreciate when those come in and Steve has taken another step towards getting that that nice fancy Miyamoto shirt. So 100,000 sets is the limit for that. So if you want it and there's only 19 of them left. So yeah, just got to, got to recognise those things are going to go quick. So I am going to go on to my little tip section here and I guess what on the meta level, what is the lesson to take away from this? And for me it was it's really worthwhile focusing on the talent aspect of the Three T's, the time, talent and treasure and people are so diverse that they just can contribute in ways and see things that I can't.
They do things differently. And, you know, I wouldn't have looked into open source history without that suggestion from from Sara. Alex gets more eyeballs and the code makes it more secure. More is on this podcast will actually make it better because people will contribute in various different ways. They might have audio stuff that they can hear about. They might give me more suggestions, they might tell me hiring you, saying I'm a little bit or you're being too self-deprecating. You need to be more arrogant, you need to do these things. So and I would take them in.
Some of those suggestions will be helpful. Some of them might not. And that's okay. That's the whole aspect of of the talent really coming in because other people can see and do things differently. And so if you're checking out your screen now, it's going to look like a little gobble of numbers or letters and strings of lists. And it's like, what the hell is this? Well, this is the podcasting 2.0 team taken from the GitHub. And this is a list of everyone who has contributed to podcasting to point out in some way or at least have done something which has made them worth while of of joining the list.
Because, I mean, there's probably honestly a lot more people than what is on here. And it's just so hard to keep up with everyone who has. And so if you go through that list and you won't be able to do it on the on the screen here because there's probably, I don't know, 100 different names more than that. And all of these different people will contribute different things. They'll be people who are podcast is on here. There's pod developers, there's people from the hosting side of the business. There's people who are more interested in databases and aggregation is obviously and Adam Curry's of The World is the Dave Jones is the these people who are the kind of core lynchpins of it, but everyone contributes.
Everyone is doing something. And so if you've got a show, if you've got a something that you're creating, whether it be digital art, whether it be documentary it's worth focusing on, what can other people contribute and how can they contribute in a way which I personally can't do, which whether it be because of personality things, whether because of where they live in the world, whether it be because they've spent, you know, decades focusing on just the aspect of photography or something like this, it's always worth exploring how can I utilise the talents and, and not only do that, but find a way for people to contribute with their talents that really improve the show or improve the end product of the art that I'm creating. And I think that's really worthwhile focusing on the the second T of the time talent and treasure, because it's, it's a huge aspect of, for example, what makes no agenda so great.
They have people who are doctors, physicists, chemists working in these different companies which can add media sources, which you won't hear. And it's like the boots on the ground. And that's just one example of how you can create a really successful show based around other people are sending into you, because that is a lot of how they get the news stories that they talk about on on No Agenda. So very, very cool. The app and service highlight that I wanted to do this week was actually want to recommend a few podcasts on top of genes as well. So what is also really sparked my interest in open source and, and learning more about how similar it is to value for value was a lot of the Jupiter broadcasting shows the suite they have and they'll definitely give you a taste of that via different mechanisms.
So there's the code of radio the self-hosted there's Linux unplugged. There used to be Linux action show. I can't remember if that still there. Chris Fischer has been in the world of open source for decades and not only that, he's been podcasting about it for decades. And so if you want to know more about open source, he's like a lifelong proponent of this model, basically, and he has also been recently especially getting very hard into the value for value and how that can help his show survive during a time where it is harder for advertising. Money has been drying up over this last year and a bit.
So he obviously sees the link between those two and how it is so important. And so if you want to know more about that, I would just recommend checking out some of those shows. Jupiter Broadcasting. And also I had a chat with him on episode 90 of The Mere Mortals, so gives you an idea of some of what it's like to embody the ethos of open source and be for and listen to it on podcast because it's open source as well. So that is it. Almost to the end of this episode, the fast last and final thing to do here is the V4 V section. Who am I going to give 15% of this episode to?
Well, I'm going to give it to someone who I am is kind of unnamed, I guess. So, you know, and that's that's the thing with open source and value for value, there's these people who have done these amazing things behind the surface, which you just don't realise is as much like how much they contributed, how much they have helped out. And so today I'm going to give 15% to Stephen Crowder, who I believe does most, if not all, of the documentation for the podcast index GitHub. And that's just really, really important work because without the putting of code into language of this is what this is, this is what that is the kind of fake news that guides is it's so hard, you know, this is kind of what this show is trying to do is give you a guide to value for value and how it can be useful for you no matter how you're creating digital content and I think that he does a crazy amount of work, and I hope this little bit that I'm contributing back to him just just goes to show that sometimes things which perhaps might seem unnoticed are actually noticed, but they might not be monetarily rewarded.
And in this case, I do want to reward him for his his effort, everything that is he's done so very, very much appreciated for that. The last aspect here I'll give you is the three TS. So the time talent and treasure, what can you do to help contribute to this show to make it better? Well, obviously sharing the episode with the digital creator, but I also really appreciate if you come and join me live. That's probably the most fun. Last week we we had a couple of people in the Memories Discord Chat which was one and Blueberry and it's just a nice environment. So I go live on a 10 a.m.
Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is midnight of UTC on that kind of border between Tuesday and Wednesday. So Tuesday, midnight, I guess you'd call it. And yet if you if you want to join me, I'm live on all of the apps you get a notification pod verse on fountain those sort of things if you have the notifications set up and pod fans is another great one. Kara Costa, podcast guru All of those will give you access to this live episode here. So yeah, I would really appreciate your time if you, if you are awake and available to join me for that talent.
Well, you've got to let me know, is there anything I can do to make this show better? What annoys you? What resources are similar to the eith up or overlap of these? Any book recommendations you would take? I really want to read that one about the cathedral and and the bazaar. I think that that would be really helpful for for me to do and yeah I would I would love to receive some of your talent. What are aspects of value for value that I'm not talking about enough. Knowing these things is very, very important to, to making this show better and to to spreading the word of value for value.
And then the final one here is the treasure. You've got three options. The most preferred version is using podcasting 2.0 app, new podcast app ask.com. If you want to check that out. And in those apps you get so much more benefits. I've got the chapters in there, I've got links for all of these things that I'm talking about. So there is a YouTube link to the Revolution OS documentary, for example. If you click on that chapter and put transcripts in there, there's all the funding tag, there's all sorts of ways where you get a better experience on these app, the live, you know, it's it's worth checking out some of one of these apps just to to experience all of the cool things that are going on.
And I will just give another shout out here to pod verse I have two for this episode so open source what can I do? Another aspect is you can go to the podcast index website or even directly to me at KYRAN at get, I'll be dot com if you want to just contribute in that manner. And so if you go to the podcast index website, for example, you will be able to acknowledge all the splits, so you will be able to send it to Stephen Crater as well, which is very much appreciated and I'm sure he would appreciate that as well. But yeah, it's that's one way of doing it.
And then the last one is via the PayPal, which is down in the links below, and you can send in PayPal directly. To me, that's more of a contribution to the mere mortals as a whole. But yeah, it is very much appreciated. This show does create a lot of time that will cost me a lot of time to research these things. It does cost me a lot of effort to get into all of the nooks and crannies to really create my notes, to spend all the time doing this. So contributing back to it is very much appreciated. And so we're going to leave it there for today. That's another value for value episode in the bag.
Thank you very much for joining me. There's probably about four episodes left of this season and then I will probably have a short break and then come back with another season shortly afterwards. But yep, four more seasons, four more episodes to to contribute to this show to look forward to, to get excited next week I'm going to be going all over the case exemple of my own stats about is value for value actually working? You've talked about it so much. Khan but is it actually having an impact? And so I will show you how it actually is. So to be to be continued next week's episode. So.
Chao for now, Kyrin out.
What are the benefits of willing listeners eager to contribute? So welcome everyone to another episode of the Value for Value show. My name is Kyrin. Host of the Mere Mortals podcast. The Mere Mortals book Reviews, but also this show, which is for digital content creators and those who are willing wanting to connect deeper with their audience and also monetise their products, perhaps in the way that is a little bit outside of the ordinary. Not using the paywall option of Patreon and not using the option of advertising, but using value for value, which is essentially getting support from your listeners who are willing and eager to contribute to you.
So yes indeed, the topic for today we're going to be talking about and today I am recording on the 27th of September 2023. I do these live as well, so I always appreciate if you want to come join with that. There's some details in the show notes about that. And today we're going to be talking about the open source revolution that's upon us. So what is this concern and why is this related to value for value? So I'm actually relatively new to open source. And I'll go more into the, I suppose, definition of that shortly. But I've I've always been a rather non-technical person.
And so now all of these things about open source software and debugging and namespaces and things like this, I've always really struggled. When I first started interacting with it, I really struggled to understand. And so basically open source is creating software code which is available to the public and anyone can contribute to it. And, and it is free in the sense of freedom, not necessarily in the sense of the actual software is free. And or at least there's it's you can monetise around it. And so they'll be talking a little bit about the history of this.
I'm going to go over some of the reasons why I think the ethos of the open source community is very similar to value for value as well as just talking about why people contribute. And we'll look at the talent part of the three TS as well. So podcasting 2.0 was my real introduction to the open source community and doing things out in the open. And it was really interesting to me and I found myself diving further into it and learning more about the ethos. This was at the same time I was learning about value for value and meant I really have dived in. I've almost did my first pull request recently.
I was trying to update the update the boost agram number numerology and I was which James Cridland actually owns on a on a GitHub. I didn't manage to do it, but I will do that shortly afterwards. But open source actually affects quite a few people and it almost certainly has affected you. So if you have ever used Mozilla Firefox, if you've ever used office, if you've ever use the VLC media player, if you've ever used a laptop with IP on it or python or shortcut KANU blend, what else do we have? Apache web, The audacity. And of course I mentioned Linux and which is basically on every Android phone.
So if you've ever touched an Android phone, you have used some open source software. At some point and you'd never really notice this. And it's it's kind of hidden in the background a lot of the times, which is sort of what I think Visa V is going to become at times. It's you'll have this ability to to connect with your audience and you won't know all of the things about Bitcoin that's going on behind the surface, which is happening with a lot of these podcasting 2.0 apps and you won't know exactly how it works. All you know is, Oh, I got a message directly from someone and there was a value of money attached to it.
Wow, that was super cool. Or Oh, this person reached out to me and they left a really nice comment. And, you know, it's because it doesn't have all of the spam type behaviour, which you'll see on YouTube comments. It's actually a valuable comment, something that was worthwhile and interesting and intriguing. And if you want to know more about these, go back to the previous episodes on Boost aGrams and the streaming of stats and things like that, which you could find earlier in the season in episodes 43 and 44. So we can see, okay, there's open sources is upon us.
We're encountering it every day. How does this actually relate to value for value and why? Why are they similar? So I'm going to go over a couple of properties here, which I have done in my bit of research over this past week because I didn't really know much about the history of it. And it's it's actually pretty fascinating going into it. And what really helped me was this documentary called Revolution OS, which was a documentary, and a lot of it showcases the the starting of how people were using software. This is basically like the geeks and the nerds. And when they were first creating software, it was in this open environment.
No one had passwords on their laptops and they because they would just or on their computers, I guess you'd call them back then and they because there was no need to everyone was just would just contribute. And even when they did set it up, one of the guys, Richard Stallman, who I'll talk more about shortly, would just hack into the database and then find everyone's password and then email and be like, Hey, just so you know, like your password is blah, blah, blah. But it's much easier to just press the into button because obviously it's tongue in cheek because he's he's saying saying and showing how the ability to share software just because you have a password one doesn't mean it's necessarily secure.
And it's a kind of a barrier to the ethos of of sharing publicly. So open source code and this is just a reading here from a little website, open source code is usually stored in a public repository and shared publicly. Anyone can access the repository to use the code independently or contribute improvements to the design and functionality of the overall project. So we can see that okay, having a password is not helping, that it's actually a hindrance to people coming in. And so there was this thing called the Free Software movement, which was started by this guy Richard Stallman.
And free actually in this case doesn't refer to price Free is very much about the liberty to access the code to change it for anyone to have access to it. And if you go and learn more about the free software movement, he's kind of got these principles which he lays out and they're very much related to liberty and personal choice and things like this. And essentially it's the ability to change, adapt, use or not use without restrictive IP and licensing. And so I think coined this term the copyleft instead of the copyright, which is the and this is coming from that documentary, a, quote, inalienable right to cooperate with other people and form a community.
And so that was from this guy, Richard Stallman, the Free software Movement founder. And I think this is exactly what is happening with values in value music. For example, if you look at the adaptability of of what's happening, someone is putting up their music, for example, and once again, go back to some of the previous episodes where I talked about value for value music and how this operates. So this is going back to episode 45 and 46. This is where you can see, okay, someone is putting up something they've created, so they've put in some hardware and created something and now they're putting it into an RSS feed and basically just saying if anyone wants to use this, adapt it, do what they want to it, they can please just give some accreditation.
And this is where it comes to the licensing sort of aspect, because with with this software, open source software, it usually comes with a distribution license and the license includes terms that define how developers can use study, modify and most importantly, distribute the software. So it's not necessarily free in the sense of you can do whatever you want with it, you can change it, not give accreditation to to the person who has created or steal it directly or things like this. There are a lot of nuances with this, which is exactly what is the same with V.
For V, it's a lot of nuance, but essentially what I see is it's very similar in that someone puts up a piece of software source code software, someone puts up some music, other people can see that adapt it, and so they can add lines that code and then they can either with with some of the licenses, some of them say if you change it enough, you need to then call it something different so that the original person is not getting, I guess, tainted with your with what you've changed to it because you could be putting malware into it and they don't want their name associated with that.
Or you could just be doing minor alterations to improve some bugs, which is, you know, a good thing. Value for value music if someone puts the music up and then I put it into a V for V Jace show. So this is like a value for value music show where I'm maybe talking over it, maybe I've done like a couple of scratches, maybe I'm jumping in and out and being like, Yeah, here comes the bang. A part 2 to 2. Obviously you're changing the music. You're adapting it because you're adding your extra audio on top of it, or perhaps you've done a remix or something like this, but we can see, okay, this is it's the same ethos.
Someone's putting something up and just saying, Hey, I've created this thing, why don't you use it? You can adapt it, you can do these things to it. And obviously there's going to be some nuances. And I would actually imagine if value for value music kind of gets as big as I think it's going to get, there's probably going to need to be some licenses and different types of licenses. Oh yeah, You can use it in this sense or you can only use it if you're including me as a 90% split or my value block, as is 90% of it. So I get 90% of any income coming in from people listening to your show, which is it?
Using my music. So I think this has got a very similar use case of value for value. And I do the same with my show here. Like I put it out there, if anyone wants to create clips from it, if they want to adapt it, do anything they want to it, that's awesome. If they want to rip off the entire show and then put it on Spotify. Yeah, okay. I'm not happy with that person. Hey. And so this is where it's like, yeah, there is some boundary points that can be crossed, but once again, the nuances, it's the, the spirit behind it of, of sharing things publicly.
And I think that's a very noble ambition and something that actually in the best in the long term actually distributes things, makes it more widely available. So another point here, which we have is contribution. So open source is all about others contributing to make it better. And this can be done on a somewhat voluntary basis or they can be compensated for it. So, you know, no financial gain or they actually have some. And we can see this in in various aspects, various aspects of value for value as well. Alex Gates, for example, he contributed the topic for this week.
He was the one who suggested I do open source software or open source and on the value for value show and how that relates to value for value. And you know, that was a great suggestion because I probably wouldn't have done that without him. I wouldn't have done the research to do this very show without him, him saying that. And so then looking at that and then saying, okay, you know, I do something similar with the value for value splits as well with this very show. So if you look into the the value block for this, you'll see I've got two which are at 1%, one is for the blue spot by C Dubs and another is by the fountain blue spot, which is just a service that I add on to this because I find it beneficial.
It's surface boostagrams in a way that I personally can't do and highlights them in a different way. And I'm willing to compensate people for that and they just ask that they get put into the splits. And this is very much how open source software works as well. People contribute, they make things better, and then they're not trying to lock down the software itself. Anyone can get access to it, but it does take effort, time to learn these things and you can make it easier. Yeah, sure. I'll come to your workplace and I'll help install it for you. I'll train up your staff so they know how to use the Linux operating system or Debian or whatever it is that they're running on their particular computers and servers.
And so I think this aspect of contribution is very much important to do value for value as well. Someone can help contribute to this show in in various different ways and I'll talk more about that at the end in this case, we've seen that Fountain and C Dubs have done it through a software as a service sort of way. They've created something I could never create. I don't know how to code, I don't know how to do these things, and I'm compensating them for that. And then Alex Gates or Sir Alex Gates has contributed to this show by giving me a topic which I wouldn't have thought about otherwise, but I'm not going to compensate for this one.
And so you can kind of see there's these these two aspects which are very, very much similar with them, open source. And so, yeah, very, very interesting to to see that kind of parallel there. Another one is transparency, and you can actually make a better product when anyone can view all the bugs messiness and how the sausage is made. And so in this revolutionary documentary it was talking about this guy called Eric Rayment, who sort of honestly is probably like it's kind of similar to me in that he's kind of like a little bit of a philosopher whilst also trying to do practical things.
And so he wrote this manifesto, I guess you'd call it, called the Cathedral and the Bazaar, and it was basically a a document, a paper that he wrote, which is sort of in a book form as well, talking about how he was arguing in this, that by creating using open source and having people coming in to the actual code itself, you're getting more eyes on it, you're getting more people looking at it, you're getting more people fixing it as compared to a company with closed software who only have a limited number of developers and they have to be, you know, they're on a time schedule.
They're on a pay. If they don't get paid, they're not going to be working on it. And he was just essentially saying that in the long run, actually open sourcing your code does create a better product because you have more people doing this. And I believe the same applies to to content creation. When you start having ads and sponsors entering the picture, I think this starts to shift. I think your products that you're creating becomes diluted. And this is not a new observation. People over the many years have talked about how, you know, art becomes mainstream or commercialised and then it's it loses that essence that made it this underground thing that was so vibrant, so passionate, so interesting and unique.
And then it it becomes mainstream. It becomes, you know, kind of corrupted by all of the influences of people saying, Oh, you should probably not talk about this on this show. You might not want to do this. And it's not like it ruins it necessarily, but the misaligned incentives that we were talking about from the last episode, I think to start to crop up, you see on the open source side of things or on the business side of things, of software, if something is closed source, you tend to get these monopolies looking at you, Microsoft or this locked in behaviour where you you offer it to someone and then it becomes an integral part of the of the company that is using the software.
And then you start not supporting previous versions. So they have to upgrade and then you're, you've got kind of like poor customer support because they don't have any other option. They have to use you. So if you only want to hire five customer support people when you really need ten, well it's like, well, too bad you just going to have to deal with that company because you're locked in. And in all of these cases, it's creating a worse product for the person who wants to use it in the software side of things. And I mean personally, my belief is that the more ads you start to add in, the more sponsors, the more outside influences that you have on your show probably are going to have this type of behaviour where it is locking you in, where you are doing things that I think just create a worse product.
And so having this transparency of, look, this is how I do the value for value. So you can see exactly who is influencing me and how much they're influencing me because I read out all the boostagrams and because I acknowledge the support. And in this case, if I do start talking about this particular topic, you know, it's it's because either I want to or because I've been influenced in a way which you can see it's the kind of things hidden behind the surface, which are the leads to worse outcomes, I personally believe. So we've got the adaptability, we've got the contribution, we've got the transparency.
And then the far final one here was the meritocracy. And so only the software that people want and adopt and adopt will actually survive long term. So just because something is open source doesn't mean it's good. You know that there's plenty of bugs, there's plenty of things that make it kind of crappy. And it's it's very much if we look at podcasting 2.0, for example, if there wasn't a desperate need for from people like me who wanted to create a better product, who wanted to be able to connect with their audience in a in a more peer to peer manner, being able to do it through the actual podcasting apps themselves instead of having to direct them to go on to Instagram or go onto Facebook and do this thing and then connect with me there, I'm much it just makes so much more sense to be able to do it within the app.
Why can't we do it that way? Okay, well, we don't have all the infrastructure. A namespace sets of rules to for app developers to be able to do this. All right, let's let's do it. Let's create it. And that's exactly what Adam Curry and Dave Jones did. And you know, if people didn't want that, it wouldn't have taken off. It would have died on the vine. Podcasting, too, when I would have had 15 shows and then it would have been like, eh, nothing's really happening here. Okay, All right. Let's let's call it that. Instead, what has happened is there's been a super vibrant, vibrant community formed.
There's a lot of people working to create apps to talk about value for value. Me here, you know, there's people who are great at code, there's people who are great at advertising, there's people who are great at finding hidden podcasts. The Swedish tricolour, for example, there's people who are great at documentation, which is very necessary for developers to be able to use all sorts of things. We can see the so many people who want to contribute, who are willing to contribute, and it's the contribution that that provides the value, I guess, and the same sort of thing.
If you have a company, for example, that a show. So let's look at it. In this case, there's you've got a company that has created a service around some open source software. If the software is not getting picked up, if Linux was not being used, the companies that were created back in the day, I can't remember some of them from this Revolution documentary, they would have gone nowhere. They would have one was called Linux VA, for example. It had a big stock price thing, it iPod. And what you could kind of see was like it just kind of went down over time.
Now this was probably do a lot to the the dotcom bubble burst that that happened around that time. But there were other companies that did IPO red hot for example, which still exists to this day and is still thriving. And you know, it is related to the marketplace and not having monopolies or outside control on on a fair market, which typically tends to lead to to worse outcomes. So, for example, on the podcasting side of things, if you have a show by a company designed to sell a product, that's probably going to need some outside source of revenue to keep that show going.
So for example, let's just take Nike and they've got a podcast related to selling the newest Nike shoes, the newest Nike natural brand that's coming up. You're probably not going to want to use value for value. I'm not sure value for value will really work for a show like that because they've got a very explicit purpose of of selling you something. The I guess like the the show is it's more of a sales device rather than something which is designed to to bring value to the customers, to the the people listening to the podcast. It's it's actually more designed to take value from them.
It's trying to get them to to buy the newest piece of shoe or the newest shirt or something like that. And so in that case, it's it's more of a extractive value. So it probably needs I'm not sure value for value would work for a show like that. Whereas if you have other shows, hopefully like this one, which are trying to provide value in that sense and then just asking for value to be returned, you know, if, if I do the show for ten years and I it doesn't take off, people aren't getting value from it. You know, that's just the market. That's just like, all right, well, people actually didn't want what I'm creating here and they didn't value it enough.
And so the show goes away and, you know, there's no there's no problems with that. And I have no problems with the, you know, the Nike type podcast who are trying to sell things. That's just advertising, that's marketing. That's, you know, how you get a product out there. I just don't think that will work super successfully or would even work at all with value for value. And so when you've got this kind of meritocracy of the best software, it's open source, it's out there, anyone can use it and contribute. If people don't like that project, they're not going to contribute.
It dies on the vine, very similar to a show doing value for value. If it's a show which is providing value, it is making things better. People will contribute back to that. There's no doubt about that. And it's just how much. And if that will serve you over time as well, that kind of meritocracy, I think it will could almost call it the free market, if you want of value for value is sort of the free market. If if it's a if it's a crappy product, no one's listening, no one wants it, it's going to go away. And this is where, you know, the onus is on me to actually create something that's good.
I do hope that I create something which is valuable that helps people out. And so yeah, that's I suppose the four main aspects that I see for creating something, the, the ethos that is matched between value for value and open source before I get onto the Instagram lounge and I did want to make one more point about the incentives for contributing as well and a little story time here. So I do the minimalist podcast with my co-host one. We've been doing that for years now and have you know, we've gradually I've basically been showing him about the value for value, about podcasting, 2.0 open source, this sort of thing.
And we always are trying to come up with new ways for people to incentivise people to contribute to the show and to create more value for the show. And he was suggesting, like, Oh, okay, what if we do this thing for in October or Yeah, in October we do a pay back to listeners. So if someone boosts in a certain amount, well then put them in the value block for the next month and that way they'll be, it can be kind of like a game type of deal where if the more they contribute, the more they could get contributions from the past. And it's kind of like, you know, if you look at it that way, it's almost leading to the the the Ponzi economics style, you know, taking from others to pay back the original people.
And I was when he first suggested this, I was I was kind of off the bat like, I'm not not a big fan of that one because it does have that sort of feel of the taking from others to pay for the original people to then get them to, you know, and I it a lot of incentives and gamification is about just doing things to make people do things, even if it's not necessarily in their best interest or I mean, I guess you could say, you know, actually I'll take that back because who knows what's in someone's best interest if they want to play, spend their whole life playing video games, like please go at it.
Just be aware that that's what you're doing. You are spending your whole life playing video games, you know, 5 hours, 10 hours a game a day. And I look, I love it as well. I'm very fascinated by the history of Speedrunning. I watch videos on them all the time. And you know, there are people who will dedicate thousands of hours to just playing one level of a game over and over and over again. But in this case, I was going, yeah, I'm not I'm not so sure on that. I'm not too happy about that. And I couldn't exactly say why it was what in particular that that made me go, Yeah, but when I was thinking about this more, I realised what it was.
And so I'm going to actually give a suggestion here of some learning A I've taken from a podcast called Volunteer Technologist Spike Guy called Gene Liberman, and if you ever seen boosting around it's name is Gene Bean and he's got a few episodes out now, I think eight and he's got one coming out pretty soon with Mitch Downey, who is from Pod verse one of the apps I talk about regularly, who pod verse actually is open source. And he the Gene actually sent me that interview a little bit before it was released. Very much appreciate it for him to do that and what I've taken away from listening to his show.
And so his is all about volunteer technologists. It's people volunteering their time to create technology to help other people out. And so in this case, he was talking about how Mitch with Pod Verses was really interested in the accessibility aspect of the pod versus app of creating it so that it's helpful for people who do have accessibility problems, whether that be trouble seeing, whether that be trouble hearing, whether that be trouble, you know, in any of those sort of cases. So in this case, this is why transcripts were so important for for him and integrating that into pod verse.
And in general these people are not motivated by money. If you look at what's actually going on, why are they doing these things? Why are they creating, volunteering their time and they're not getting compensated? Obviously, that's the the whole aspect of volunteering. And so when it comes to the incentives for contribution, for open, open source, it's it's typically not money. It's or I would say it's probably, you know, 4% of people contribute to a show, probably 96% of people will contribute to open source or to a show, not for any financial aspect at all. So in this case, they're writing code.
They're doing it because they want this thing to succeed. And sure, they'll do some hours outside of it, though they'll share it with their friends. They will help a developer out. They'll be on the beta testing like I am for Fountain, and they will join the communities, they will participate, they'll do all of these things where it's there's nothing financial related to it. And if there is, it's like, Whoa, that was unexpected. I didn't I didn't know that would happen. And very much the same, I think, for for people contributing to a show that they don't want to get paid back in return, if someone's contributing to this very show, they're not contributing so that they can then get some money back in return.
They're contributing so that I can read out their name so that they feel good about contributing to to something of value. Because I am putting in a whole ton of work of watching these documentaries, creating the resources, doing all the links, the chapters, all of that sort of stuff. And it's they, they, they just, you know, they just want the name read out. They just want to feel good for themselves. They just want to create a connection with me because I'm awesome or you're nice. And so this is where I was like, okay, incentives wise as well.
It's probably not the best for, okay, let's if you if you contribute to this show, you're going to get this thing. And look, we do do that for the mere mortals, which this show is considered part of. If you contribute more than 100,000 sets, we will send you a miyamoto's t shirt. But it's like, you know that that's just basically an equivalency because 100,000 sets at the moment is about 40 AUD, which is about how much the shirts cost in the first place. So it's not like you're, you're coming out of this with anything in a financial aspect, but you do have, you know, my appreciation.
I send you a note now I send, you know, this shirt as well is a is a confirmation of that. You have contributed. It's it's like, you know, limited edition. So you get that aspect as well. There's all sorts of reasons why people contribute and most of it is not related to money. So when you think about the open source or whether you think about value for value, it is important to to have a deep think about, okay, why is someone actually contributing to this show? Is it because they want a financial return and some point in the future? No, it's probably not.
It's probably for other reasons and it's best to highlight those reasons and make them more available and widely known. So that was very, very cool. I'm going to now jump onto the Boosta Gram Lounge before we start talking about some tips and other things at the end. Welcome to the Value for Value. Boostagram Lounge. So the Boostagram Lounge for everyone who is wondering is the section where I read out the messages for people who have contributed to the show in a in a monetary form and thank them very much for that. It's the best way to do this is via a podcasting 2.0 app, and today I'll really highlight podcast because podcast is open source and you can go contribute to podcasts and you can also contribute to this show by sending in a boost.
A boost is a message that you send within the actual app, very much like how you would send a comments on a YouTube video. And when you send that message, it comes directly to me because all of the infrastructure and all things like that are set up with it and you can choose an amount to help support it. So we use Satoshis at this moment and there's all sorts of fun things you can do with the numerology, as you will see in the Graham numerology link, which I'll also put into the show notes. And so you can do things like like Ruby did last week with the 1770, 70,776, which is a big liberty boost and a whole bunch of people have contributed today.
So I can see right off the get go here that Sam Sethi was streaming and a lot of payments would say some somewhat coming through with this boostagram. So very much appreciated for that. Thank you very much. And also William Kenny. So that was really, really cool. And then the only other one I've actually gotten from this week was from the God caster himself, Steve Webb. Another episode Car and keep It Up. 17,777 So almost almost a big liberty boost will count that as one or two a stripe, a boost with an extra one at the front of it.
And he sent that in using fountain and you can actually go check out an episode I did talking about one of his shows called Life Spring Media in season two, which was episode number. Oh, let me just bring this up here in my upload. It shows season to episode number 22 last spring, Family Audio Bible. So very much appreciated. Thank you. Steve and Steve obviously enjoyed last week's episode, which was all about how does this time go so quickly? What was last week's episode about? Last week's episode was about the incentives of hosting and how everyone needs to win.
So thank you very much, Steve, for that. Once again, you can contribute in very many ways, and it's not just via Boostagrams, but I really do appreciate when those come in and Steve has taken another step towards getting that that nice fancy Miyamoto shirt. So 100,000 sets is the limit for that. So if you want it and there's only 19 of them left. So yeah, just got to, got to recognise those things are going to go quick. So I am going to go on to my little tip section here and I guess what on the meta level, what is the lesson to take away from this? And for me it was it's really worthwhile focusing on the talent aspect of the Three T's, the time, talent and treasure and people are so diverse that they just can contribute in ways and see things that I can't.
They do things differently. And, you know, I wouldn't have looked into open source history without that suggestion from from Sara. Alex gets more eyeballs and the code makes it more secure. More is on this podcast will actually make it better because people will contribute in various different ways. They might have audio stuff that they can hear about. They might give me more suggestions, they might tell me hiring you, saying I'm a little bit or you're being too self-deprecating. You need to be more arrogant, you need to do these things. So and I would take them in.
Some of those suggestions will be helpful. Some of them might not. And that's okay. That's the whole aspect of of the talent really coming in because other people can see and do things differently. And so if you're checking out your screen now, it's going to look like a little gobble of numbers or letters and strings of lists. And it's like, what the hell is this? Well, this is the podcasting 2.0 team taken from the GitHub. And this is a list of everyone who has contributed to podcasting to point out in some way or at least have done something which has made them worth while of of joining the list.
Because, I mean, there's probably honestly a lot more people than what is on here. And it's just so hard to keep up with everyone who has. And so if you go through that list and you won't be able to do it on the on the screen here because there's probably, I don't know, 100 different names more than that. And all of these different people will contribute different things. They'll be people who are podcast is on here. There's pod developers, there's people from the hosting side of the business. There's people who are more interested in databases and aggregation is obviously and Adam Curry's of The World is the Dave Jones is the these people who are the kind of core lynchpins of it, but everyone contributes.
Everyone is doing something. And so if you've got a show, if you've got a something that you're creating, whether it be digital art, whether it be documentary it's worth focusing on, what can other people contribute and how can they contribute in a way which I personally can't do, which whether it be because of personality things, whether because of where they live in the world, whether it be because they've spent, you know, decades focusing on just the aspect of photography or something like this, it's always worth exploring how can I utilise the talents and, and not only do that, but find a way for people to contribute with their talents that really improve the show or improve the end product of the art that I'm creating. And I think that's really worthwhile focusing on the the second T of the time talent and treasure, because it's, it's a huge aspect of, for example, what makes no agenda so great.
They have people who are doctors, physicists, chemists working in these different companies which can add media sources, which you won't hear. And it's like the boots on the ground. And that's just one example of how you can create a really successful show based around other people are sending into you, because that is a lot of how they get the news stories that they talk about on on No Agenda. So very, very cool. The app and service highlight that I wanted to do this week was actually want to recommend a few podcasts on top of genes as well. So what is also really sparked my interest in open source and, and learning more about how similar it is to value for value was a lot of the Jupiter broadcasting shows the suite they have and they'll definitely give you a taste of that via different mechanisms.
So there's the code of radio the self-hosted there's Linux unplugged. There used to be Linux action show. I can't remember if that still there. Chris Fischer has been in the world of open source for decades and not only that, he's been podcasting about it for decades. And so if you want to know more about open source, he's like a lifelong proponent of this model, basically, and he has also been recently especially getting very hard into the value for value and how that can help his show survive during a time where it is harder for advertising. Money has been drying up over this last year and a bit.
So he obviously sees the link between those two and how it is so important. And so if you want to know more about that, I would just recommend checking out some of those shows. Jupiter Broadcasting. And also I had a chat with him on episode 90 of The Mere Mortals, so gives you an idea of some of what it's like to embody the ethos of open source and be for and listen to it on podcast because it's open source as well. So that is it. Almost to the end of this episode, the fast last and final thing to do here is the V4 V section. Who am I going to give 15% of this episode to?
Well, I'm going to give it to someone who I am is kind of unnamed, I guess. So, you know, and that's that's the thing with open source and value for value, there's these people who have done these amazing things behind the surface, which you just don't realise is as much like how much they contributed, how much they have helped out. And so today I'm going to give 15% to Stephen Crowder, who I believe does most, if not all, of the documentation for the podcast index GitHub. And that's just really, really important work because without the putting of code into language of this is what this is, this is what that is the kind of fake news that guides is it's so hard, you know, this is kind of what this show is trying to do is give you a guide to value for value and how it can be useful for you no matter how you're creating digital content and I think that he does a crazy amount of work, and I hope this little bit that I'm contributing back to him just just goes to show that sometimes things which perhaps might seem unnoticed are actually noticed, but they might not be monetarily rewarded.
And in this case, I do want to reward him for his his effort, everything that is he's done so very, very much appreciated for that. The last aspect here I'll give you is the three TS. So the time talent and treasure, what can you do to help contribute to this show to make it better? Well, obviously sharing the episode with the digital creator, but I also really appreciate if you come and join me live. That's probably the most fun. Last week we we had a couple of people in the Memories Discord Chat which was one and Blueberry and it's just a nice environment. So I go live on a 10 a.m.
Australian Eastern Standard Time, which is midnight of UTC on that kind of border between Tuesday and Wednesday. So Tuesday, midnight, I guess you'd call it. And yet if you if you want to join me, I'm live on all of the apps you get a notification pod verse on fountain those sort of things if you have the notifications set up and pod fans is another great one. Kara Costa, podcast guru All of those will give you access to this live episode here. So yeah, I would really appreciate your time if you, if you are awake and available to join me for that talent.
Well, you've got to let me know, is there anything I can do to make this show better? What annoys you? What resources are similar to the eith up or overlap of these? Any book recommendations you would take? I really want to read that one about the cathedral and and the bazaar. I think that that would be really helpful for for me to do and yeah I would I would love to receive some of your talent. What are aspects of value for value that I'm not talking about enough. Knowing these things is very, very important to, to making this show better and to to spreading the word of value for value.
And then the final one here is the treasure. You've got three options. The most preferred version is using podcasting 2.0 app, new podcast app ask.com. If you want to check that out. And in those apps you get so much more benefits. I've got the chapters in there, I've got links for all of these things that I'm talking about. So there is a YouTube link to the Revolution OS documentary, for example. If you click on that chapter and put transcripts in there, there's all the funding tag, there's all sorts of ways where you get a better experience on these app, the live, you know, it's it's worth checking out some of one of these apps just to to experience all of the cool things that are going on.
And I will just give another shout out here to pod verse I have two for this episode so open source what can I do? Another aspect is you can go to the podcast index website or even directly to me at KYRAN at get, I'll be dot com if you want to just contribute in that manner. And so if you go to the podcast index website, for example, you will be able to acknowledge all the splits, so you will be able to send it to Stephen Crater as well, which is very much appreciated and I'm sure he would appreciate that as well. But yeah, it's that's one way of doing it.
And then the last one is via the PayPal, which is down in the links below, and you can send in PayPal directly. To me, that's more of a contribution to the mere mortals as a whole. But yeah, it is very much appreciated. This show does create a lot of time that will cost me a lot of time to research these things. It does cost me a lot of effort to get into all of the nooks and crannies to really create my notes, to spend all the time doing this. So contributing back to it is very much appreciated. And so we're going to leave it there for today. That's another value for value episode in the bag.
Thank you very much for joining me. There's probably about four episodes left of this season and then I will probably have a short break and then come back with another season shortly afterwards. But yep, four more seasons, four more episodes to to contribute to this show to look forward to, to get excited next week I'm going to be going all over the case exemple of my own stats about is value for value actually working? You've talked about it so much. Khan but is it actually having an impact? And so I will show you how it actually is. So to be to be continued next week's episode. So.
Chao for now, Kyrin out.
