

StoryWorth (YC W11) Aims to Elicit and Record Family Stories - nickbaum
http://allthingsd.com/20130403/storyworth-aims-to-elicit-and-record-family-stories

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akharris
Been using storyworth with my dad for the last few months. Learning new things
about him is awesome, and he definitely wouldn't be interested if this were
just a mobile sorta thing. Keep it up!

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phillmv
Hey!

I love this kind of service. That said, here's what I want:

I want a description of what happens when you give up or get acquired. Thirty
days notice for this kind of thing is not good enough. What about an option to
be crawled by the Archive Team?

I'm glad your committing to be around for forever, but a worst-case plan is
absolutely necessary to trust you with my family's patrimony, etc.

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nickbaum
Hey, StoryWorth founder here. Great point, and especially important for a
service where the data has value for decades to come.

Crawling by the Archive team isn't really an option, since the information is
mostly personal and private.

However, the way I've addressed this is by making data export part of the
story from the start. At anytime, you can request a backup of your stories,
and I will send you a beautifully formatted PDF, along with any audio files
(and eventually pictures, videos, etc).

If the service ever had to shut down, I'm committed to giving everyone ample
notice to download such backups. So worst case, your stories would no longer
be accessible at StoryWorth.com, but you would always have them.

Does that seem reasonable? This is something I care a lot about, so I'd love
to hear other suggestions.

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phillmv
Yeah.

I recently began to the process of digitizing family photos and thinking about
the best way to keep them around for another fifty years and found myself
playing with the idea of building this kind of infrastructure.

You're still relatively early in the game - on a decades long timeframe at
least - but it's worth considering these kinds of policies. Your average
customer is probably not savvy enough to have a preformed opinion, but from
one technologist to another I find myself naturally pedantic over what "ample
notice" might mean.

If you're lucky and successful you'll eventually have to deal with stuff like,
"what if the user dies, and stops paying" - do you delete the data?, and how
do you handle people associated with them looking to grab the info?

Having a next-of-kin login process or a "shutdown the webview but allow people
to always have access to their backups" would be considerate.

Good luck :).

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nickbaum
Agreed. I made data-portability a key point from the start, but these
scenarios are important to think through.

Some details:

* Anyone who has access to a user's stories can download a backup at any time.

* If a user stops their subscription for any reason (including death), I will notify all users who have access to those stories with the option to download a copy (or renew the subscription). Depending on the size of the data, I may even be able to include the full backup in the notification email.

* I will keep backups available for download for as long as possible after the subscription has lapsed, ideally indefinitely (this also makes resubscribing more compelling).

* For full peace of mind, I send you all the text responses by email, so you have a copy archived there. I will look into including the actual audio attachments in the emails as well.

The trickiest scenario is if a user dies and their stories aren't shared with
anyone. I could assume that the person didn't want these stories shared, but I
think these will have to be dealt with on a case by case basis.

[edited to fix line breaks]

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flyingdtchmn
Have both my parents on this and its a treat to get the weekly morsels of
information I have never known about them. Major +1. Good luck with the
official launch!

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duck
One small nitpick - if you're going to put a Chevelle on your site and talk
about the one Dad had, don't use a picture with 20" rims. :)

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nickbaum
Hah, great catch!

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danso
I'm kind of surprised there's no date element connected to the stories, if the
samples are any indication:

<https://www.storyworth.com/sample-story/nancy>

By "date", I mean, the day or era that the stories take place in. If my
parents enter a bunch of these stories in it'd be nice to have a way to view
them besides as a list of headlines.

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nickbaum
Hi Dan, good suggestion. You will be able to add more metadata to the stories
down the line (dates, maps, etc). That will open up a lot of cool
visualizations (timeline, map, etc). It could also be fun to pull in related
data from that time period, for example newspaper headlines or archival
photos.

The reason I haven't added this yet is that I've focused on the writing
experience. Because most of the stories are written via email, there isn't a
structured way to add metadata, so it has to come as a secondary step (either
automatically extracted, or annotated by family members)

