Tag: Mirabai Knight

Bulletin: New York Times Features Stenographer Social Media Stars

Check out this article from Sam Corbin. The article features some really talented people such as Vanessa Stanton, Denée Vadell, Mirabai Knight. Gabe Henry is quoted as saying “there should be fewer grammar police and more grammar philosophers.” I can say I agree with that after over a decade doing what we do. The Steno Barbie petition got included. I beat the NY Times to that one.

The article also mentions that Open Steno’s Plover Discord has over 7,000 active members. That’s somewhere between 23% and 33% of the professional field. There were a lot of people who cried shortage for multiple years that deliberately looked away from an immense source of recruits. Go ahead and punch Open Steno or Plover into the search box of my site and sort to relevance. I wonder who could have called the corps out on that?

I won’t beat around the bush. At first glance, I was a little perturbed that the New York Times ran with this instead of, say, a fraud against tens of thousands of people. Because I’ve done lots of things to get the newspaper’s attention. But Corbin writes about language, so it actually makes a lot of sense, and I can’t be mad.

Thanks for making this field shine, steno stars. Without you, where would we really be? Watching you all keeps me hopeful and optimistic. Send me stuff any time to share with my network.

Open Steno’s Unprecedented Growth Continues

The Open Steno community formed years ago. It gave us Plover, a free stenographic translation software, as well as several other projects, such as the StenoMod. In the words of Mirabai Knight, Open Steno’s founder, “steno is going strong…” The community also gave us Steno Arcade, a computer game dedicated to stenography.

The Plover Discord has reportedly reached over 4,000 members, or about 13% of our industry’s size. The steno video creator Aerick has over 1,000 subscribers on YouTube as of writing. The Uni Kickstarter has raised $50,000, more than double its $20,000 goal. If companies like Stenograph are unwilling to support our profession, professionals might consider joining forces with and funding Open Steno’s creators. Their ability to do more with less has been well documented over the last decade.

As more professionals join the Discord chatroom and community, and assist those teaching themselves, I expect the number of people entering our professional track from Open Steno and other self-paced initiatives to skyrocket. This use of non-traditional self-learners is exactly how computer programmers have addressed much larger shortage concerns. In our field this also means there’s a large pool of recruits unaccounted for by organizations like STTI and US Legal.

Readers that wish to donate to the Open Steno general fund and Mirabai Knight may do so here. Together, we will continue a nationwide recruitment surge, mentor and nourish our self-taught and traditional students and graduates, and pave the way to a future for stenographic court reporters.

OpenSteno.org