Privacy for Storytelling
From our start in 2023, the Projectkin Community has been incredibly generous with their ideas and projects to share. I’ve only rarely had the chance to share a project recipe. I started on this idea soon after joining Substack. The more I worked on it, the more I appreciated its potential. This could be important for you, too. Let me explain.
As consumers, we’re often lured into platforms whose business models require us to compromise our privacy. Advertising models famously have this as the core exchange. For my family archive, I decided that privacy was non-negotiable. The story you tell is affected by who is in the room. The solution I came up with had to ensure a reasonable level of privacy for storytelling.
In building Projectkin.org, my commitment to privacy and platform independence led me to realize that I could use my development experience to help fellow genealogy travelers create private storytelling spaces. I hope this is helpful to you, too.
Combining platforms
Today’s talk brought together two core elements of that private storytelling effort:
The WeAre.xyz family history archive is private by default, though you can configure pages as public blogs.
Substack as a multimedia-rich, yet potentially access-controlled, newsletter.
Putting the two of these together creates a pathway for private storytelling that’s also archived. This has great potential for families. That’s what this solution is all about. As I described during our event (and as you can see in the recording above), I’ve prepared a few resources for you to use to recreate this for yourself.
This assumes you’re comfortable creating materials and generally playing with tools like Substack newsletters and WeAre.xyz for your archive.
Ingredients
As I explained in the presentation, you are more than welcome to explore this recipe using your own “ingredients” (specifically, different archive or outreach tools). In fact, if you do, we’d love to hear about it. Please add your thoughts in the comments below.
To share these Projectkin recipes, I’ve developed a format that consistently covers the ingredients and workflow. This time, however, I realized that there’s more detail to provide about configuring your Substack for a “private” podcast that is non-obvious, so I’ve created a separate “detail” document with step-by-step instructions:
Since it’s also helpful to have a copy of slides, I’ve provided those here as well. All documents are in PDF format though with so many illustrations the files can be quite large.
I hope you have enjoyed this program. Feel free to add questions and comments below, and if you’re interested, you can also explore the discussion in the Substack chat.
I will add that based on a question asked in the chat I didn’t notice till after the program ended, I added a slide to answer a question about whether we were “Just linking” to video. Also note that this post itself is an example of a video post. — Great question,
.
We’re coming up on a busy season of events for Projectkin. To see what’s coming up next, please visit —
Project Recipe » A “Private Podcast” as outreach for your Family Archive