In trying to lay out an eight-hour schedule, I'm trying to lay out a framework to work within and a goal to aim for. This doesn't preclude doing podcasts right now, in fact doing them would be eminently sensible. You've just got to do them with an eye to a future where you can download them from a WMF server, catch them on our Internet radio service, or any other number of ways of getting at the content. You need to work to a more strict timescale and be able to swap in and out different intro/outro pieces for the context the material is presented in.
So, on one track we work on all these, "please be less ambitious" sides of the argument. People do their podcasts and recordings as they would, but perhaps with reference to time constraints that might apply in a radio environment. Where building a library of timeless material is feasible, it gets done.
Then there's the technical side of this. It certainly isn't going to happen overnight, a lot of "glue" software would need written to keep to a seamless schedule. With some of the things I see in WMF press releases we'd really be looking to run a lot of software that currently has no connection whatsoever with MediaWiki. To oversimplify to the point that a developer would wake in a cold sweat, we need an extension; one that can feed data out of a wiki and into a content generator that interfaces with a broadcast server. From some poking around that'd be Icecast and Liquidsoap. The MW extension would need to control Liquidsoap; send queries and accept responses from it as to what to play next.
To state the obvious, the majority of the development time on something like this is going to have to come out of the community. Brion and his merry men are probably up to their asses in alligators trying to make sure SUL and Flagged Revisions go off smoothly. What I think is the good news is that when we do get them to look at this FLOSS stack for radio, it certainly appears to have been set up with the WMF in mind. It has a version that reminds me of squid proxies, and it looks like you could almost run this cache system as close as the last mile and have ISPs with their own server providing the stream and their main line kept free for other stuff.
When the technology is in place, we start streaming. I'll be honest, if it's all Commons music to start with I don't care. Obviously, I want to see Wikinews doing the top of the hour headlines at this point, but the relevance of that is only going to increase as we bring in other projects and expand the content. The beta should see the "how to do audio" lessons from Wikiversity broadcast throughout a segment; stick in the Wikipedia podcasts on a Sunday with a Wednesday repeat... You've a radio station. If we can get to that point I think we've a project that will just grow naturally.
Brian McNeil -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard Sent: 24 April 2008 11:06 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wimimedia Radio WAS:RE: Legal position ofaudiorecordings of GFDLcontent?
On 24/04/2008, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
I think it's an admirable idea, and suggest you start small and grow
bigger.
No need for 8 hours off the bat, when there are zero hours now. As the longest running regularly published audio product in the Wikipedia
universe,
believe me when I say it is quite an undertaking.
Yeah. Anyone who's done public radio knows what a commitment a weekly radio show is.
- d.
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