Pod Together

Challenge
Name:	Pod Together
Date(s):	2011-present
Moderator(s):	Klb (2011–present), Paraka (2011–2020), Amproof (2016), Shmaylor (2017–present), Minna (2021–present), Rockinhamburger (2023–present)
Founder:	Paraka, Klb
Type:	podfic, fanfiction
Fandom:	multifandom
Associated Community:	Tumblr; Dreamwidth
URL:	AO3 Collection, Tumblr, Twitter
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Pod Together is an annual podficcing challenge, founded by Paraka and Klb. It is subtitled A collaborative challenge for writers and podficcers. It has communities on Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and Discord, and a collection on Archive of Our Own.

From the Dreamwidth profile:

Welcome to pod_together (also mirrored on twitter (announcements only) and tumblr)! A challenge where writers and podficcers join together to create awesome projects - the writer writing something specifically to be podficced, and the podficcer recording it.

Why are we doing this?

Reason One: A lot of podfic meta talks about the connection between podfic acting and TV or movie acting. But there haven't been many stories written specifically for podfic before. This challenge will give us a chance to take that analogy a step further, and also dispel some of the sense that podfic is nothing but a format shift for stories intended to be read on paper.

Reason Two: We think it will be a fun and interesting challenge for writers to write something specifically meant to be performed. For podficcers, the interesting challenge will be figuring out how to adapt to this format and bring the story to life.

The challenge was inspired by the 2011 Spring Fling podfic anthology.

Rules

Participants may sign up with a partner or group they find themselves, or sign up individually to be matched by the mods. The goal is an equal collaboration, although ultimately the writer gets the final say over the words of the work and the podficcer gets the final say over the performance of it.

The minimum length for fanworks is 1000 words or 10 minutes of audio, with no maximum besides what the collaborators feel they can achieve. Podfics should be in mp3 format and permit streaming.

See Rules and FAQ.

2011

Posting started in July 2011. There were 73 participants, creating 41 projects in 31 different fandoms. Fandoms included Adam Lambert (Musician) (4 works), American Idol RPF (3), Bandom (4), Discworld - Terry Pratchett (1), Glee (3), Gunless (2010) (1 work), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (3), Hawaii Five-0 (2010) (2 works), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (1), Inception (2010) (2 works), Jennifer's Body (2009) (1 work), Kris Allen (Musician) (3), Lost Souls - Poppy Z. Brite (1), Merlin (TV) (1), My Chemical Romance (4), Panic! at the Disco (1), Princess Bride (1987) (1 work), Rapunzel (Fairy Tale) (1), Sherlock (TV) (1), Social Network (2010) (2 works), Stargate Atlantis (5), Stargate SG-1 (1), Supernatural (6), and White Collar (1 work).

The AO3 collection for 2011 can be found here.

2012

Starting this year, participants were given the option of creating an unmodded collaborative project with no word minimum and no internal deadlines, called a Party Favor.

53 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 8 Party Favors.

Fandoms include Adam Lambert (Musician) (2 works), Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (1), The Avengers (2012) (12 works), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom (1), Bandom (15 works), Batman Beyond (1), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2), Cain Saga and Godchild (1), Cobra Starship (2), Criminal Minds (1), Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album) (1), Doctor Who (1), Doctor Who & Related Fandoms (1), Doctor Who (2005) (2 works), The Dresden Files - All Media Types (1), The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher (2), Empires (1), Fall Out Boy (1), Firefly (1), Glee (1), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett (2 works), Good Wife (TV) (1), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (2), Inception (2010) (1 work), Iron Man (Movies) (1), KORMAN Gordon - Works (1), Life with Derek (1) Lying Is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes Off (Music Video) (1), Macdonald Hall - Gordon Korman (1), Marvel Cinematic Universe (5), Merlin (TV) (2), Meta - Fandom (1), Music RPF (1), My Chemical Romance (11 works), One Direction (Band) (1), Panic! at the Disco (4), Parks and Recreation (1), Person of Interest (TV) (1), Queen (Band) (1), Sarah Jane Adventures (1), Sherlock (TV) (2), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms (1), Social Network (2010) (1 work), Stargate Atlantis (1), Supernatural (2), Supernatural RPF (2), Teen Wolf (TV) (4), Thor (Movies) (1), Voltron: Lion Voltron (1), X-Men: First Class (2011) (2 works), and Young Veins (1 work). A collection was set up on the AO3 here.

Following this round, in order to bring more attention and feedback to the works that had been created, akamine_chan and Glittery created weekly spotlight posts. Each post included a link to one of the projects (selected at random) and a rec for that project that made sure to highlight the work of both the writing partner(s) and the podficcing partner(s).

2013

61 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 8 Party Favors.

This year, the timeline was expanded and icebreaker week was started. Icebreaker week is a week "where partners get to know each other and talk about their shared interests and expectations for the project, before work on the project begins." This includes optional questions posted by the mods each day that partners can answer for each other to help build their partnership.

Following the 2013 round, a spinoff challenge called Pod Together Lightning was created by fleurrochard and somnolentblue. This was similar to Pod-Together except that each round lasted only one month and the minimum was 100 words. It also included the option to be matched on fandom, on genre/trope, or to be matched randomly. Pod Together Lightning ran for 7 rounds, from November 2013 to May 2015, and led to the creation of 81 projects. These works can be found in the pt_lightning AO3 collection.

2014

58 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 8 Party Favors.

Starting this year, groups who signed up together were given the option to opt out of check-ins.

The early podfic submission deadline was implemented this year. Groups that met this early deadline were guaranteed to have their project earlier in the reveal schedule.

Projects were revealed at the rate of 3 or 4 per day, which meant that reveals lasted 19 days this round. Following this round, the scheduling was changed so that reveals would always last exactly 10 days.

2015

46 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 6 Party Favors.

From this year on, m4b download options were no longer required. Participants were given the option starting from this year to opt into receiving important posts as emails rather than needing to follow the Pod-Together Livejournal or Dreamwidth.

2016

56 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 10 Party Favors.

2017

74 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 8 Party Favors.

This year, individual signups were renamed to "matchmaker sign-ups" to make clear that groups of two or more podficcers, or two or more writers, could sign up together looking for someone to be matched with. To improve compatibility of matches, a question was added about ideal interaction level, on a scale of 1 to 5.

2018

61 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 3 Party Favors.

The early writing submission deadline was implemented this year (and continued in all future years). This early deadline was 4 days prior to the normal deadline, and projects that met this deadline were given an earlier date in the reveals schedule.

The extension policy was changed this year, so that groups could have an extension of up to 3 days on each deadline with no questions asked and could be given an extension of up to 7 days if they included a plan for how they intended to finish within the time they requested.

From this year on, projects were no longer required to have embedded streaming, due to AO3 site changes that broke a lot of the previous embedded streaming code.

2019

62 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 8 Party Favors.

The Pod-Together Discord was created mid-round this year, shortly after Check-in #2.

2020

A total of 95 projects were created. The AO3 collection for 2020 can be found here.Sign-ups were originally scheduled to close on June 6th 2020, but the schedule was pushed back a week in order to not draw focus away from the protests against policy brutality happening at that time and to give mods time to reflect on changes that could be made in light of the conversations about anti-racism happening across the world. Those changes included the introduction of content moderation rules, which were posted alongside a list of resources to help with creating antiracist fanworks. There were channels made in the Discord for discussing how to make pod-together a more antiracist space, and there were weekly discussions about relevant articles found by mods and participants. One of the things that came out of these discussions was the creation of the Pod-Together Characters of Color Love subcollection "to boost and celebrate works about characters of color and encourage more of them within the bounds of our challenge."

This year had a Filk Broken Telephone challenge organized by carboncopies. Three teams worked simultaneously on writing filk based on the song that came before. A collection was set up on the AO3 here After all the songs were revealed, a live "concert" was held on the podtogether discord where people listened simultaneously to recordings or sang their songs live. A recorded version can be found here

This year's round also saw the creation of the Sentient Hive, "a fanwork-creating collective that came together through a series of podfic fests in 2020. What they make can be described as interactive fiction, or playable narratives, with varying levels of "gamification." The goal of each project is always the same: create an immersive multimedia mystery set in a beloved fictional world."

2021

90 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 7 Party Favor projects outside of Filk Broken Telephone. This round of Filk Broken Telephone had 3 chains, with 6 or 7 filks in each chain, for a total of 19 filks created.

Starting this year, the audio and text part of a project were allowed to be in two separate AO3 posts, as long as those posts linked to each other at the top. Prior to this, the audio and text needed to be in the same post.

2022

112 projects were created as part of the main 2022 round, and there were 7 Party Favor projects outside of Filk Broken Telephone. Filk Broken Telephone 2022 had 3 chains, with 4–6 filks in each chain, for a total of 15 filks created.

2023

110 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 6 Party Favor projects outside of Filk Broken Telephone. This round of Filk Broken Telephone had 4 chains, with 4 or 5 filks in each chain, for a total of 18 filks created.

This year, a weekend-long listening and commenting event called Pod-Together Weekend Jamfest was introduced, the weekend after all projects had posted. According to an announcement on the pod-together Discord and Tumblr, "Weekend Jamfest was a big success! We had 22 participants who each listened to 30 minutes or more of pod-together 2023 projects, for a total of 75 hours, 58 minutes, 27 seconds of listening!

Those 22 participants left a total of 185 comments, and, excitingly, they made sure that there are 0 projects left from this year's collection that have not received a comment on both the writing and the audio. This is the first time ever that we've had 100% of participants receive a comment within the first year after posting, let alone the first week!"

2024

105 projects were created as part of the main round, and there were 4 Party Favor projects outside of Filk Broken Telephone. This round of Filk Broken Telephone had 4 chains, with 5 or 6 filks in each chain, for a total of 21 filks created.

This year for Weekend Jamfest, "18 participants (4 fewer than last year)... listened to a total of 98 hours, 39 minutes, and 47 seconds of Pod-Together 2024 audio (over 20 hours more than last year!) and left 358 comments (nearly TWICE as many as last year)!"

Mentions

The Organization for Transformative Works interviewed klb and paraka about the challenge in 2019: OTW Guest Post: pod_together – Organization for Transformative Works, ^{Archived version}.

Archived

CDs of the podfics from the 2012 challenge were included in TAMU's Media Fanzine Collection.