Robert Ambrogi Blog
Colorado does a number of things very well. Mountains are one. Beer is another. Colorado has some 230 breweries and is home to more than 10 percent of the nation’s craft breweries.
It makes a certain degree of sense, therefore, that when two Colorado lawyers decided to launch a podcast, they agreed to include craft beer on the menu of topics they would discuss. The result is FOSS+beer, a podcast about the intersection of the law with technology and open source software. And, of course, beer.
In each episode, they feature — and consume — a Colorado craft beer. Why? “Because there is a lot of good beer here and, well, geeky law topics are much more interesting when alcohol is involved,” their website explains.
The hosts of the podcast are Mark Donald, counsel and legal technologist at Chainring Software, and Jilayne Lovejoy, open source attorney at ARM. A third host, who is not a lawyer, is identified only as Boups the Beerman.
The idea for the podcast was actually conceived by Mark and Jilayne in the tap room of the Upslope Brewing Company in Boulder, and Upslope was the featured brewery in their first episode.
In that episode, Mark talked more about the reason for weaving talk of beer into their discussions of legal topics.
Part of the thought process behind that was that so many legal podcasts are just really dry and boring and formulaic and they’re sort of like recorded CLE sessions with a long recitation of resumes at the beginning.
In other words, they wanted to be creative in the presentation of their podcast in order to keep it from being dull. And to that I will gladly raise a mug.