Production update 7 - 60 dense pages or 19 minute podcast?
Making official documents easier to understand. At least for me
Policy and strategy are the stuff of my professional life. Especially in the last two decades. I’ve helped shape them, scrutinise them, and occasionally create them.
After many years, I know how I work best in this situation. I have a five stage process:
I sketch out my opinion or read the proposal
I read around the topic
I listen or watch someone talk about it
I read again my notes or the proposal
Then I sit down with my keyboard, organise my thoughts and begin to write
This multi-sensory loop doesn’t just help me understand an issue. It allows me to test it, stretch it, and view it from different angles.
And so it has been as I’ve researched for this blog. But recently, I’ve run into a problem.
It is - understandably - well nigh impossible to engage with the authors of some of these proposals. Consider the draft strategy from Richmond Council.
I want to contribute. I start by downloading and reading the proposal. It is good. Well written too on the whole. At times it is long and dense, despite the best attempts by the authors to make information more accessible by isolating chunks
That stage complete, I would usually meet, watch or listen to someone explain the proposal. It could be in person or a YouTube video or a background explanation from Apple Podcasts. In this case I couldn’t find anything meaningful.
I turned to Google’s NotebookLLM software. This provided me with the next best thing.
It is a free service. You can upload a document to the service and use the chatbot to query the document. Or you can suggest a topic, let NotebookLLM find the best sources and then use the chatbot to query those.
You can use the chatbot conversations in a number of ways. I find the mind-mapping tool useful. I have also created several FAQs. The standout functionality is the interactive audio.
You instruct NotebookLLM to generate an audio file. In this case the 19 minute podcast or programme took about four minutes to generate. It is a very good summary of the strategy document presented in an easy to understand way. The podcasts hosts - a man and a woman - discuss the document. It is uncanny. The only downside? The two hosts are American. ‘Borough’ is pronounced ‘boro’. Not a deal-breaker.
The result is perfect for my needs. Try it to see if you agree - podcast summary of Richmond’s Climate and Nature Strategy.