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tags: Communications, Foundation for Public Code, Marketing, Product, website
---

# Interview Arnau Monterde (Decidim)

- When: Videopodcast/livestream will take place on Sept the 8th, 2020. Starting time for the public: 16h.
- Promise that podcast will be live by CoB the next day.
- Length: ideally 20 minutes but it'll also depend on the questions from the audience in the live channels (Youtube chat, Twitter, Linkedin etc.)
- Language: English

## Structure

### Intro
- Bumper
- What is the podcast: participate, come live!
- Who is Arnau
- Doctor in Information Society and Knowledge by the Open University of Catalunya.
- Technopolicy project coordinator of the research group Communication Networks and Social Change at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute since 2011 at the UOC.
- Last but not least coordinator of Decidim Barcelona and Decidim.org

#### Script for intro

Alba: Hello and welcome to Let's talk about public code, a podcast by the Foundation for Public Code. My name is Alba Roza.

Jan: And my name is Jan Ainali. We are both codebase stewards at the Foundation for Public Code focusing on the communities of the codebases we work with.

Alba: That is why wanted to start this podcast, to be able to both showcase and learn about the fantastic codebase communities that we come across in our work.

Jan: This is the first show in this series where we interview someone who is actually in one of these communities. We aim to release new episodes monthly.

Alba: Throughout this series we will get to know, with the help of our guests, several projects that do work with public code.

Jan: So *we* define public code to be both civic code (like policy or regulation) and computer source code (such as software and algorithms) executed in a public context, by humans or machines.

Alba: And because it serves the public interest, it should be: open, legible, accountable, accessible and sustainable.

Jan: Every government is going through digital transformation. But the proportion of governments in the world that are going through digital transformations compared to the number of technologists that understand this or programmers that want to help with that makes it a tough problem.

Alba: We need to be able to work together - it's either we work together or we give the keys to companies that'll sell us things, and then they'll keep us in their grid. So we need to learn how to work together. As the Foundation for Public Code, we are trying to build that collaboration at scale.

Jan: With that as our background, let's bring on our first guest in this series.

Alba: Today we will talk to Arnau Monterde, Doctor in Information Society and Knowledge by the Open University of Catalunya.

Jan: He is the Technopolicy project coordinator of the research group *Communication Networks and Social Change* at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute since 2011 at the UOC.

Alba: Last but not least he is the coordinator of the codebase Decidim in Barcelona and Decidim.org, welcome Arnau!

### Interview with Arnau

1.REPLIED What is Public Code to you?
2.REPLIED Did you know the Foundation for Public Code before?
3.REPLIED What is Decidim. Flashy numbers to explain it, perhaps?
4.REPLIED What is the persona, profile of the people that belongs to your community?
5.REPLIED Differences in between Decidim and MetaDecidim. Why there was a need of creating this association?
6.REPLIED Your MetaDecidim members can be both individuals and public organizations. How did you achieve so many individual contributions to an open source project? (Also asked for $)
7.KINDOFREPLIED Why did your codebase get so popular? Steps you had to take.
8.REPLIED Issues or difficulties handling it. Steps to avoid.
9.REPLIED You have a very large and diverse community. How do you manage to talk to such a different spectrum of people?
10.REPLIED When the project was born you were also very close to CONSUL in Madrid. Why did you decide to keep both codebases? Aren't they more similar than someone would think?
11. Also keeping an eye on what happened in CONSUL in Madrid, do you see a stable future for Decidim?
12.REPLIED There is an event called DecidimFest coming up in November. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is and why you started it?
13.REPLIED What are the future steps you'd like to follow
14. Is there something you wanted to tell us but that we didn't ask about?
15. Nominate someone for this podcast as following guest.
16. If people want to get in contact, where can they find you?

### ENDING

Thank you Arnau for making the time to come on here in our first episode.

The audio version of this will be out tomorrow evening, you can subscribe to the podcast at podcast.publiccode.net

Or you can subscribe to our Youtube channel instead if you like the video format.

We will be back in about a month, if you want to engage in even more interactive sessions you can join us in our community calls, which you can sign up for in the link in the footer in our site about.publiccode.net

Bye!

### Episode title and description (for the upcoming video event pages on YT, FB, LI)

Title: Let's talk about public code #1 - Arnau Monterde, Decidim

Description: In the first episode of 'Let's talk about public code', we will meet Arnau Monterde. Arnau holds a PhD in Information Society and Knowledge from the Open University of Catalunya, and is the coordinator of Decidim codebase. Decidim enables free open-source participatory democracy for cities and organizations.

## Communications plan

## Target audience

- Codebase level:
- Civil servants working on public code codebases (ie. potential stewardship material). Project managers.
- Civic tech people working on codebases in use by public orgs
- People interested in FOSS in general
- People interested by specific types of software
- Media following up on a particular codebase or use case.
- The codebase being interviewed and its followers.
- Politicians interested in a specific project/city
- Vendors/tenders
- Other people involved in the codebase: designers, UX, communication, competitors, etc.

- Personal level (interviewee):
- 3Fs: family, friends and "fools"
- Media if controversial speaker
- Side projects of the interviewee
- Conferences, events, webinars, or similar activities the speaker might be involved with

**Keep an eye on underrepresented collectives (ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual preferences, etc.)**

## Distribution

Use Streamyard.com. It can livestream to several platforms at once. We can start by streaming to:

- [Youtube]. We have to create an account here.
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/publiccodenet)/Periscope (make sure there is a Periscope account connected to the Twitter account)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/publiccodenet/) page
- [Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/publiccodenet/)

The Streamyard account need to have someone who has administrator/editor rights on these destination platforms to connect them before streaming (only need to be done once). It's $39/month, up to 8 destinations.

### Reuse as actual podcasts

After the livestream, we could also reuse the audio. By doing some editing on it (cut out long pauses, normalize and compress audio etc.) adding more bumpers in some place we can make it sound more professional. Then we can distribute through any of the existing podcast networks (or even host it ourselves if we want). When a podcast is set up somewhere, and there is a RSS feed for it, it can also be connected to [Hacker Public Radio](http://hackerpublicradio.org/) and [Free Culture Podcasts](http://freeculturepodcasts.org/).

## Awareness raising/marketing

**Take a look at the communications plan [here](https://app.asana.com/0/1188223866091825/calendar).**

### Basics: native platform video links

For LinkedIn and Youtube the streams can be created long before, and will give the followers an option to be reminded. On Facebook it's only possibly a week in advance. But for all these, they are quite favoured by the algorithms and followers will generelly recieve notifications unless they opt-out.

Twitter only have a shareable link once the streams start, but it is also possible to tag people in the tweet so they easily can retweet it when it starts. For this reason one tactic could be to make the introduction long enough for the guests to be able to retweet it before they are brought on screen. The guests should of course be briefed about this so that they are prepared.

### Before the videopodcast

- Ready **three weeks** (at least) in advance:
- Copies
- Images
- Graphs
- Blogpost
- Send mail to mailing list.
- Social Media campaign: short video (?)
- Shared strategy with the stakeholders involved for every interview
- Test everything in advance
- Share the questions with the guest so no delays happen and he/she can run it with his/her communications dept. if needed.
- An ace up your sleeve: backup name in case the current guest can't make it. Ideally, that person would be the next guest.

### During the videopodcast

- Test everything before going live
- Keep an eye on attendees questions and behaviour: when are they connecting, which is the most successful platform and why, best timing, etc.
- Remind them what the Foundation for Public Code does and how to contact us in an easy way
- Remind them at the end of ways of keeping in touch with us and tell the audience who the next person we are trying to interview will be. This is always going to be last question we are going to make to our guest, so the following person would *have to* listen to the *public call*.
- Follow up of attendees/viewers: connect them to a Call to Action such as sign up for our tailored-to-your-preferences-newsletter.
- Record Arnau and use it after the podcast as an audiogram in social media.

### After the videopodcast

- Set a date for the following one (ideally with a months notice)
- Social Media campaign ending
- Make both video and audio available in our website (if software allows it, right after the interview finishes.)
- Post a blogpost with the link to the video and also the audio
- Keep an eye on the other codebases
- Metrics (number of views, number of people that signed up, increase on number of leads that reach out to us later on, number of clicks in our blogposts, videos, audios, social media, etc.). Iterate, engage and act according to prior data.
- Feedback request: audience and guest

### Other ideas

- Announcing our podcast in a blogpost and share that blogpost on all the platforms we will stream to as a heads up.
- Promotion through the guests network. Give them all the links, graphs, copies, etc. created in advance so that they easily can share them.
- Invite people from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented collectives as well.