QA-DAO Transcription Service

Many community events in Catalyst are recorded as video, usually raw videos of Zoom meetings. These provide an important documentary record of what happened – but they are not always very usable. If someone misses the meeting and wants to catch up, this means watching the whole video, which is time-consuming; and searching for something is impossible without time-stamps, which most event organisers don't have time to create. Also, the discussions in community events often refer to people, organisations and ideas that newcomers do not know; so without some kind of gloss or annotations, this can be excluding and offputting.

QA-DAO (quality-assurance-dao.github.io) proposes to solve these issues by providing verbatim transcripts, time-stamps, and summaries of videos of key Catalyst community events, and collating them on GitBooks and the QA-DAO website. This will make the video material more discoverable and accessible by the community in several ways:

• Speed. It's much quicker to catch up if you miss a meeting - most people find reading a summary much quicker than watching an entire video.
• Search. If you're looking for a specific topic or speaker in a meeting, or across several meetings, you can find it more quickly.
• Onboard. For those new to Catalyst, summaries make it easier to understand at a glance what's being discussed (particularly since our summaries include weblinks to key concepts, organisations and people mentioned).
• Accessibility. People who use screen-readers can readily use a text transcript (the audio recording can be less accessible as it can be hard to identify who is speaking); and for people with hearing impairments, and people who are less confident with English, a verbatim transcript and/or summary can function like subtitles, making the video much easier to follow.
• Internet access. People with slow Internet connections can access the text record even when they are unable to watch the video.
• Historical record. Catalyst is a groundbreaking endeavour, so it's important to record its development for posterity. An accurate verbatim transcript provides a useful second form of authoritative record (other then the video) of what has been discussed and decided. Unlike video, it is easily searchable, which aids transparency – if someone wants to know "What exactly was said about X in that meeting in August 2021?" they can find it quickly.
• Translation. We all recognise the need to translate English-language material within Catalyst, to increase access for speakers of other languages. Transcription and time-stamping are the first steps in translating video material – so we are making key video material ready to translate.

So transcription, time-stamping and summaries increase everyone's access to what's happening in the Catalyst community, which helps us all be well-informed and active participants.

Proof of concept
QA-DAO is already successfully doing this work with Catalyst Circle meetings (funded until April by the fund 6 proposal "Oversight of Catalyst Circle"). For example, see https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v2/meetings/meeting-2-november-25th-2021.

In this proposal, we want to expand the work to cover other key community events (After Town Hall; Eastern Town Hall; Cafe Sur le Pont; one-off events such as Governance Day, etc) which are particularly significant for onboarding new people, enabling active and informed participation, and increasing connections between different "corners" of Catalyst, such as voter/proposer interaction, and facilitating team building.

We also want to use this project, and the community feedback it will generate, to help us develop a standard methodology or guidelines for transcription and summary within Catalyst, and build a body of evidence that answers questions such as "Which types of meetings need full verbatim transcription? What kind of information should be in a summary? What types of meetings do new people find most accessible/inaccessible?" etc. This would, we hope, eventually lead on to QA-DAO being able to train a team of transcribers/ summarisers to embed this aproach within Catalyst. This scale of transcription and summary needs resourcing.

Which videos will we work on?
We will focus on community events that will help people become more involved and engaged with Catalyst. We propose to deliver:

• 1 regular meeting per week, of significance to the community, fully transcribed, time-stamped and summarised (probably Eastern Town Hall, Cafe Sur Le Pont, Town Hall main meeting, or similar)
• 3 meetings each a week time-stamped and summarised (no full verbatim transcript). These could be After Town Hall breakout rooms, Swarm breakout rooms, or similar. We propose that each week, we will conduct a community vote (Google Form or similar) to ask people to vote for which breakout room or session they think should be processed that week. The process of inviting people to vote (which we will do via Discord, Telegram etc) will also draw attention to the summaries themselves, on QA-DAO's GitBook; and, as it is a small, easy engagement, it is a first step that a new person can easily take to get more involved with Catalyst.
• 3 one-off community events in the course of the proposal (6 months), fully transcribed, time-stamped and summarised; here, we will select events that are significant to the governance and the processes of Catalyst, and to voter/proposer interaction, such as Governance Day, ChallengeFest, IdeasFest, etc.

Addressing the challenge metrics

The proposal supports the challenge metric of using events to keep the community together, as it helps address some of the barriers to inclusion, It also ensures that the benefits of a Catalyst event, meeting or workshop are more long-lasting, by making the record of the event more accessible and useable.

Annotated summaries particularly will address the metric of helping new people to integrate into Catalyst, by making it easier for them to find out what is happening and learn about key concepts. Also, our proposed process of holding a vote for which events will be transcribed is a small, easy act that will contribute to new people's sense of engagement with Catalyst.

Transcription and summary of key events like IdeasFest will help increase voter/proposer engagement by making information more accessible for voters, It will also facilitate team building and collaboration, by making it easier for people to quickly find information about who is working on things they are interested in via keyword searches.

Annotated summaries particularly will help new people to integrate into Catalyst, find out what is happening, and learn about key concepts. Also, our proposed process of holding a vote for which events will be transcribed is a small, easy act of engagement that will contribute to new people's sense of inclusion in Catalyst.

Overall, the increased access, transparency, and accessibility provided by this proposal will increase numbers - people are more likely to stay engaged and not drop out if they are able to follow events they have missed, review what happened in events they attended, and learn through annotations and links about the background to what is being discussed.

A note on our process
We use transcription software Otter.ai as a basis for our time-stamped verbatim transcripts. But due to issues such as the specialised content of Catalyst events, the diverse range of accents and dialects people speak, unstable Internet connections, different types of microphone, and sometimes several people speaking at once, the raw transcripts can be garbled, and require considerable editing. Also, we produce "intelligent verbatim" transcripts - this removes things like "um"s and "err"s, hesitations, and repetition, and edits for readability. This can be a lengthy job, but it's an important one, because an accurate timestamped transcript is the basis for everyothing else - summaries, translations, and archival record.

Budget
Note: We are using flat "per meeting/event" fees which we have devised based on industry standard fees in the UK and US for intelligent verbatim transcription, indexing and summary of multiple-speaker meetings.

• 1 meeting per week of significance to the overall Catalyst community, fully transcribed and summarised - $663 per meeting x 26 weeks = $17,238
• 2 meetings per week time-stamped and summarised, but not fully transcribed; including the engagement process of managing a community vote on which meetings should be processed: $265 per meeting, x 2 = $530 per week, x 26 weeks = $13,780
• 3 one-off events in the course of the proposal (6 months), such as Governance Day, ChallengeFest, etc. $2,645 per event, x 3 = $7,935

• Subscription to Otter.ai = $100

Total $39,053

Sustainability
Our additional aim with this project is to use the experience of transcribing different types of Catalyst events, to develop a clear methodology and style guide for doing effective transcription and summary in the context of Catalyst.

This would make it possible in the long term for us to train others to be transcribers/ summarisers and propagate the approach through the Catalyst ecosystem; and to look for ways to fund this as an ongoing service to Catalyst.

But to reach this stage, we need to build our approach by praxis and community feedback, and build an awareness throughout the ecosystem of the value of transcription and summary. That is what this project aims to do.

Risks and mitigations

• Timeliness – QA-DAO will need to receive videos of meetings in a timely manner. So far in QA-DAO's work with Catalyst Circle and in pilots with Eastern Town Hall, this is happening well; and it will be even more likely if this project is funded and the community becomes more aware of the service and its usefulness.
• Low views – particularly, the material not reaching people new to Catalyst. We will mitigate this by publicising via appropriate channels to reach newcomers, on Discord, Telegram, Ideascale; and via e.g. Town Hall, Eastern Town Hall, etc. We would also aim to hold a breakout room at After Town Hall during the course of the project,, to talk about some of the interesting issues around transcription and raise the profile of what we are doing.
• The risk that we don't succeed in identifying the content that will best engage people. We will mitigate this via our idea of inviting the community to vote each week on the two meetings to be summarised; and, with the three special events that we select to work on, focusing on events related to engagement, participation and governance, such as Governance Day.

KPIs

• Number of transcripts and summaries produced
• Number of people who look at them (assessed via Google analytics)
• Dwell time and return visits, as a rough way of assessing how useful people find the transcripts and summaries
• Significance to the community of the events transcribed (as assessed by community votes)
• Number and content of responses to and interactions with the material, e.g. comments on youtube; comments and responses to material shared on Discord, Telegram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.

Milestones

• At 3 months -14 events fully transcribed; 24 additional events summarised; 1 major event transcribed. Catalyst community engaging with the weekly vote to select events for processing. Page views and dwell time increasing.
• At 6 months - 26 events fully transcribed; 52 additional events summarised; 3 major events transcribed. 1 Town Hall breakout room has discussed issues and ideas around transcription and summary. Page views and dwell time further increased. Draft methodology and style guide for transcription and summary in the context of Catalyst written up.
• At 12 months - material fuly archived on GitBook. Methodology and style guide shared within Catalyst.

Team experience

Vanessa Cardui (@CallyFromAuron) is a community engagement professional with a background in oral history and archiving. She has 20+ years' experience of accurately transcribing video and audio material for historical record, and of using transcription and summary to make video material more accessible and discoverable for communities. She also has extensive experience of training others in how to transcribe and summarise. She is currently leading on transcription and summarising videos of Catalyst Circle v2 meetings for QA-DAO https://quality-assurance-dao.gitbook.io/catalyst-circle-oversight-v2/

Stephen Whitenstall (@swhitenstall) has 30 years' experience in organising academic, community and business projects. He develops, maintains documentation and provides technical project management support for Catalyst Swarm. In Fund 6 of Project Catalyst, Stephen's organisation QA-DAO https://quality-assurance-dao.github.io/ was funded on several significant projects, including Distributed Auditability https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Distributed-Auditability/366707-48088 and Oversight of Catalyst Circle https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Oversight-of-Catalyst-Circle/370088-48088, and Stephen was co-proposer on a number of other successful proposals around community engagement, auditability and transparency. Stephen is currently the representative for Catalyst Coordinator (Funded Proposers) in Catalyst Circle v2.

You can support the activities of QA-DAO by becoming a GitHub sponsor https://github.com/sponsors/Quality-Assurance-DAO .

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephen-whitenstall-166727210

QA-DAO Transcription Service is a project of QA-DAO (https://quality-assurance-dao.github.io), an ongoing open source project that provides support for the Cardano Project Catalyst Community. QA-DAO Transcription Service's project documentation will follow QA-DAO ideals of open-source transparency and auditability.