People who run Winter Solstices, what’s your existing process for putting together the script? A bunch of different random docs? A single monolithic google doc? a spreadsheet?
I used a main Google doc with several tabs: “Plan” for organizers’ use with bullet outline, “Booklet” for the printable handout with all song lyrics, and “Speeches” for the text of the speeches. Each bullet item in the Plan had specific timings, was linked to the sheet music and best YouTube recording of the song. Plan also had a bunch of notes/comments on how to execute each element. I separately created a Google Slides presentation with all the lyrics to be projected.
– make it very easy to transform that content into a lot of different obvious versions you might want (such as nice slides, and all-speeches script, and all-song-lyrics script, a printed program, etc)
– have a bunch of Musician Powertools (i.e. transposing songs, converting between song formats)
I currently have an almost-complete Bulk Import Your Solstice From Doc that works if your doc is an entire solstice program, and each element has a header-style font. I’m not sure if anyone would actually use it this year.
I’m aiming for a) it’s an easy enough tool people might just use it to create their programs in the first place, and b) try to be interoperable with as many other formats as is practical so you can just use it for whichever bits are useful to you, and c) it’s pretty easy to upload your program afterwards for posterity.
I’m basically interested in user-interviewing solstice organizers about it.
The format you have seems fairly easy for “bulk import individual speeches and songs” although probably somewhat annoying to import the whole program. (Although, actually it’s maybe straightforward to do a pass of importing the speeches, then songs, then table of contents and have it try to autoselect appropriate speeches/songs you just uploaded)
I’m curious what your initial reaction is to the general idea, whether you’d find it useful for your own purposes, and whether you’d feel motivated to upload your program after the fact.
I can imagine that it could be useful, but hard to say without trying to organize a solstice. I think if I used the product I would be happy to upload my program through it. I will say that most of the organizational effort was in people, not program, but that I can imagine this would simplify a decent amount of program. My big fud about projects like this is that if I don’t have ultimate control over it (eg I want to change a lyric, or a chord or something, and the app doesn’t let me do that) then I have to either give up on my change, or copy everything into Google Docs anyway, and I probably end up doing the latter and getting no value from the product.
Nod. The point of it is it’s easy to change lyrics/chords etc in a place with a single source of truth that updates slides and scripts and musician charts.
People who run Winter Solstices, what’s your existing process for putting together the script? A bunch of different random docs? A single monolithic google doc? a spreadsheet?
I used a main Google doc with several tabs: “Plan” for organizers’ use with bullet outline, “Booklet” for the printable handout with all song lyrics, and “Speeches” for the text of the speeches. Each bullet item in the Plan had specific timings, was linked to the sheet music and best YouTube recording of the song. Plan also had a bunch of notes/comments on how to execute each element. I separately created a Google Slides presentation with all the lyrics to be projected.
I ask because I’m building https://secularsolstice.vercel.app/ (warning, in beta, still janky in some places), which I’m in the process of trying to make a strict improvement over secularsolstice.github.io (while also playing nicely with secularsolstice.github.io as long as they are both in use. It does a daily import)
The goal is:
– be a repository of all solstice content
– make it very easy to transform that content into a lot of different obvious versions you might want (such as nice slides, and all-speeches script, and all-song-lyrics script, a printed program, etc)
– have a bunch of Musician Powertools (i.e. transposing songs, converting between song formats)
I currently have an almost-complete Bulk Import Your Solstice From Doc that works if your doc is an entire solstice program, and each element has a header-style font. I’m not sure if anyone would actually use it this year.
I’m aiming for a) it’s an easy enough tool people might just use it to create their programs in the first place, and b) try to be interoperable with as many other formats as is practical so you can just use it for whichever bits are useful to you, and c) it’s pretty easy to upload your program afterwards for posterity.
I’m basically interested in user-interviewing solstice organizers about it.
The format you have seems fairly easy for “bulk import individual speeches and songs” although probably somewhat annoying to import the whole program. (Although, actually it’s maybe straightforward to do a pass of importing the speeches, then songs, then table of contents and have it try to autoselect appropriate speeches/songs you just uploaded)
I’m curious what your initial reaction is to the general idea, whether you’d find it useful for your own purposes, and whether you’d feel motivated to upload your program after the fact.
I can imagine that it could be useful, but hard to say without trying to organize a solstice. I think if I used the product I would be happy to upload my program through it. I will say that most of the organizational effort was in people, not program, but that I can imagine this would simplify a decent amount of program. My big fud about projects like this is that if I don’t have ultimate control over it (eg I want to change a lyric, or a chord or something, and the app doesn’t let me do that) then I have to either give up on my change, or copy everything into Google Docs anyway, and I probably end up doing the latter and getting no value from the product.
Nod. The point of it is it’s easy to change lyrics/chords etc in a place with a single source of truth that updates slides and scripts and musician charts.