One of the most consequential periods of my recent adult life was the Mapbox Workers Union campaign. I was lucky enough to write about the experience in a widely read newsletter a couple years ago. I asked my editors to include a teaser about a podcast a few friends of mine had been working on and expected to release soon. To my surprise and delight, the editors agreed.
However, making a decent podcast requires a significant amount of time and energy. This cost only increases when the project is an oral history. Dozens of interviews, each usually several hours long, need to be sifted through and the best parts need to be stitched together to make something that both captures the attitudes and feelings of the people who were involved in these events and still remains compelling to the people listening along.
My friends have the project 80% of the way there. All the interviews are complete. A compelling through line has been identified and sketched out. They've even done a bit of editing on the early episodes. But the final work of pulling it all together and making it pleasant on the ears remains a daunting obstacle as rent & bills continue to come due every month and other, better paying projects make increasingly convincing arguments that they should be prioritized instead.
As a result, my friends have decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to help them justify and fund this final, hardest stretch of work. If you're interested in this story at all. If you'd like to know, based on in-depth firsthand accounts, what it was like as the campaign got going and eventually fell apart, and you have a few dollars to spare, I'd highly recommend backing the Kickstarter project.