Stories by Us

Stories by Us set out to document the strange, unique, and wonderful ways Americans show up for their communities. We worked in all 50 states and shot over 800 mini documentaries about people from every kind of background, skill set and corner of the country. Some stories were big, some were small, and many were delightfully odd, but each one showed someone making the place around them a little (or a lot) better.

I was the Digital Producer and Technical Director, which meant I was managing the system behind the stories in pre-production and working with the team to build the platform to get to launch day. Every submission had to come in, go through editorial, get tracked through production and land in the right hands, all while the team worked on it at the same time across the country.

Part of why it was so good to work on a large-scale production project with a web development component because I needed a refresher on traditional web dev and not the more swash-buckling approach I'm used to. Also: my skill and understanding when it comes to managing QA leveled up in a big way.

From Ad-Hoc to Platform

The workflow didn't start out designed. In the early days it was ad hoc: patched together to keep up with the incoming stories. Dozens of meetings figuring out submission flows. As the volume grew, so did the need for something real. The practice of building the airplane while flying was very much what we had to do. I managed the shift from that improvised process to a fully designed and developed web platform for users to submit their own stories.

Getting there meant

• Scripting to automate the repetitive work and keep data clean while the old process was still running. File management and lots of audio/video web authoring.
• Design through many rounds of iteration with the team
• Managing design and development meetings to align producers, editors, and stakeholders on what the platform needed to do and look like
• Onboarding new team members as the project scaled: production, creative, development
• Working with developers to take the platform from mockup to deploy, deploy, deploy!

It was a massive team and a genuinely fun project. Keeping that many people, stories and moving parts in sync was the job, and seeing hundreds finished stories come out the other end in a literal patch-work of American communities made it worth it.

The details are top secret.