About the Humanitarian AI Today Podcast Series
Some basics about our podcast for prospective guests.
Thanks for considering letting us interview you for our podcast! To answer some basic questions about the series and what to expect as a guest, we thought we’d elaborate here.
Some common questions:
Who is behind the series? Humanitarian AI Today is a podcast produced by the Humanitarian AI meetup.com community. It is produced and edited by volunteers and we’ve been using the series through the Covid crisis to continue to get amazing folks in front of our members spread across local groups in fifteen cities.
Who is our audience? Our meetup groups bring students, researchers and AI developers together to discuss humanitarian applications of artificial intelligence with staff from humanitarian organizations. In general terms, your interview will reach our 3000+ members and others interested in uses of artificial intelligence for good from the academic, tech and humanitarian communities.
Our series has become the most recognizable podcast covering humanitarian applications of artificial intelligence. We’ve helped turn “Humanitarian AI” into an AI for Good subfield and a hashtagable search category, making it easier to learn about individuals and initiatives advancing the field.
How do you publish and promote our interviews? We use Soundcloud behind the scenes to publish our interviews which can then be accessed via other popular podcast platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Podcasts and etc. After publishing, we share news of your interview with our members and via social media channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
How does the interview process work? Once you decide to consider letting us interview you, we’ll share a Google Doc (that looks like this) with you for us to use to narrow down some general subjects to cover and some rough interview questions. In the meantime, we’ll nail down an interview time and date and send you a calendar invite with a link we can use to virtually record your interview. After recording your clip, we’ll edit it, ask you to review and approve it and ask you for a photo and short bio to attach to your interview, then we’ll publish everything.
How does recording and editing work and is this audio-only? We try to use Google Meet and Riverside.fm to record our interviews. We only use the audio portion of recordings and during your interview, because we will edit the clip afterwards, you are welcome to rephrase you answers, pause and/or add editorial directions.
Do you have an agenda? We launched our podcast from San Francisco where folks are passionate about collaborating around technology at the state-of-the-art level. We do our best to cross-connect the tech, academic and humanitarian communities and bring content to table useful to individuals who either are or want to get involved in advancing humanitarian AI.
What questions do you ask all of your guests? Before we get into asking specific questions, we ask guests to briefly introduce themselves and tell us about their organizations, companies and etc. Then towards the end of interviews we ask everyone if they’d like to share any needs or leave any takeaways.
One common question that we ask everyone, as part of closing our interviews, is to envision a futuristic AI application that they’d love to see exist and to describe it. This is a fun question that gets folks thinking about problems and ways of solving them uninhibited by the limits of current technology.
How should I prepare for an interview? If you can, please use your Google Doc to help us establish general focuses and questions for your interview and don’t hesitate to let us know what ideally you’d like to talk about. On the technical side, we encourage guests to have some headphones or earbuds ready to use, to isolate and eliminate background noise if needed.
What’s new in 2022? This year we’re recruiting more guest hosts and pairing hosts from the tech or humanitarian communities with guests from the other. We also plan to try again to publish interview notes on Medium.com and provide listeners with ways to support and help scale the series.
How can I get in touch? If you’d like to contact us directly with interview ideas, names of folks we should interview and etc please feel free to email us via: team (at) humanitarianai.org or message us via LinkedIn or Twitter.
