I am posting this to foundation-l and wikitech-l, because there is both a technical and a policy aspect here.

A small but growing group of Wikinews contributors is actively making audio recordings of Wikinews stories. This effort is coordinated here:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Audio_Wikinews

The files are uploaded to the Commons in Ogg Vorbis format. Now, two members of this group have started to also produce a streamed version of this, which is broadcast at specific times -- effectively Internet radio. This could grow into a real independent wikiradio project which perhaps could encompass more than just news. The usefulness of realtime broadcasting for news should be obvious.

The current Wikinews page is at:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:WikiNews_Network

Now, here is our dilemma:

Streaming audio in realtime requires special software. WNN currently uses ShoutCast, which is not free/open source software. It is also not hosted on Wikimedia's servers, but on the server of one of our contributors. (We have the same issue with the print edition, but I'll try to resolve this separately.)

Do we want to run this on our own servers? If so, there is a free software implementation called Icecast. Would it be possible to securely set up an Icecast server for this purpose on our hardware?

If we don't want to run it on our servers, should we allow it to be called "Wikinews Network", or should it use a different name?

Should we set any specific limits for the project's scope beyond NPOV, or should we let it experiment freely with the format for the time being? (There was some talk about ads on the program, but I made it clear that this was absolutely impossible.) As for NPOV, a wiki-radio project might want to broadcast news *about* the wiki community; do these have to strictly adhere to NPOV (the German Wikipedia:Kurier, for example, does not)?

Best,

Erik