The Organizers of PodTales 2020 would like to take a moment to address our virtual event which ran throughout November and comment on what we felt worked well, what we’ve learned, what we plan to improve, and where we’re going from here.
Overall, we feel we managed to create an exciting and inclusive environment that captured the spirit of our first in-person event while bringing it to a supportive and engaging virtual space. We hope those of you who participated feel the same way. Still, although we’re proud of our work, we know we have a lot to learn.
One area where we plan to improve is with accessibility. As a team, we apologize for not doing better in this area. There were needs we failed to meet, despite the priority we gave to accessibility in our planning. Specifically, we did not anticipate the use of voice chat within the showcase Q&A sessions, or of voice recordings in general chat, and so were unprepared to ensure transcription of these events. We deeply regret this unpreparedness. In the future, we will audit the tools intrinsic to our digital platforms in order to better anticipate how they will be used, and the accessibility barriers that these uses may raise. We will also develop a formal accessibility policy that will allow us to more agilely and effectively respond to accommodation requests as they arise during our events. Additionally, as we grow, we plan to raise the funds necessary to hire accessibility consultants who can better guide us in preparing an event that is more accessible overall.
Another primary objective is to improve representation within our organizing committee. Our organizers volunteer an extraordinary amount of time for this event, and we do not wish to ask people of color to work for free. That said, our core organizing team–and consequently, our core panel moderation team–is too white. We should have recognized this during the planning stages, and are incredibly sorry that none of us stepped down from our events in order to make room for more moderators of color. Therefore, we plan to raise the funds necessary to establish stipends to hire and pay non-white organizing staff for future events, and will put forth an open call for interested parties as soon as we are able to do so.
More specifically, we plan to bring a new member into our organizing committee with expertise specific to actual play podcasting. While our team values the art of actual play storytelling, none of our current members have the knowledge or background necessary for engaging and recruiting program participants from the AP community. This led to challenges in staffing our AP programming, and most critically, a failure to achieve the level of racial diversity we sought for these panels. This meant that, when faced with the reality of running understaffed panels because we were unable to reach many of the players of color we’d tried to contact, we invited additional white panelists instead of admitting that we needed help reaching a community that we weren’t actively a part of. We have begun talks with a candidate for the AP liaison position who is committed to helping us achieve these goals.
Each member of our organizational committee recognizes the position of privilege we operate from and the implicit biases that are ingrained in us which lead to these failures. It is our duty, not only to learn from the marginalized communities affected by them, but to provide opportunities for those people who may not have had them otherwise. Positions as panelists, organizers, and moderators of future PodTales events, yes, but also of any other festivals and conferences that we take part in individually as well.
We also want to clear up some confusion about the Discord and Patreon. We have received feedback expressing concern that Discord conversations from the month of November are now behind a paywall, accessible only to Patreon supporters. This is not the case. All PodTales 2020 Discord communication from the month of the event (November) was archived before the Discord reopened to Patrons in a freshly blank state. Archived communications are viewable only by PodTales staff.
Overall, we loved how the community came together in our Discord and we plan to use it again for future events. We feel this is a great way to connect to everyone, including those creators and fans who may not be able to attend an in-person event. We have received valuable feedback on how to improve our implementation of the platform, which will allow us to offer an even more vibrant and accessible community space in the future.
We’re proud of our PodTales Showcase, and plan to do something similar in the future. We feel it represented a broad selection of talent and voices and we want to continue to use it to highlight creators who deserve more attention for their work.
We’re also proud of our programming and feel the panels and interviews were engaging and informative. We can’t thank our panelists and moderators enough! Although it is not the norm, we feel strongly that programming participants at events like ours ought to be paid for the work they do and the value they provide. We were particularly pleased to be able to improve our pay rates slightly from what we offered last year, and hope to continue improving our pay standard at successive events.
As for what this means for the future of PodTales, our ideal is to create a hybrid of in-person and virtual programming to make the show more accessible, including for those who can not attend in-person. That said, we are also certain that there will be a longer wait for PodTales 3 than there was for PodTales 2. The committee members need to prioritize personal projects (including the completion of Greater Boston) before focusing on PodTales again. To be clear, PodTales will return, just not on a strictly annual schedule, and not in 2021. However, we will use that additional time to strategize the fundraising necessary to achieve the various goals laid out above. Once we have more information on what our next event will be like and when it will be held, we will share it with the public.
This event is a labor of love. We want to thank all of the organizers, volunteers, panelists, moderators, and creators for their time, energy, and artistry. We acknowledge this was an imperfect event, just as we acknowledge we are imperfect people. We are committed to doing our best to provide a free and accessible event that celebrates independent fiction podcasting. We hope we managed to do that this year, and we thank you for giving us a call to do it again. No matter how difficult it may have been to produce, working on this show helped brighten one corner of a very dark year, and our hope is that those of you who participated in the event feel something similar.
Thank you, take care, and best wishes for 2021.