[Foundation-l] Wimimedia Radio WAS:RE: Legal position ofaudiorecordings of GFDLcontent?

[Brian McNeil]

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 at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at 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 at 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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