| Something interesting happened last year.
I've been running a streaming server for a couple years now, which is basically a rotating playlist of songs and shows that are of interest to the No Agenda and Daily Source Code podcast audiences.
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| Audiences are communities
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| Twice a week we turn on the live stream for the No Agenda Show, on Thursday and Sunday mornings at 9am pst and on alternately on Friday and Saturday afternoon for the Daily Source Code. Although these shows are distributed as podcasts, I like recording them with a live audience, who provide real-time feedback in the irc based chatroom that is also maintained by the audience/Community of these shows. The chatroom runs 24/7 and there's always someone in there with an interesting conversation, since the community is a global one and time-zones provide for a constant supply of energized Human Resources.
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| I've been a radio broadcaster for the past 30 years, both on the talent side as the programming/technical side of the industry. This started over 30 years ago when I built my first FM transmitter and my mom drove me around the block to see how far my signal would reach. From there I 'graduated' to a DJ after soldering together an audio mixer to mix records (remember those?) on my two turntables.
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| After that a decades long career followed comprised of working for closed circuit stations in hospitals, urban pirate radio stations in Amsterdam, Podcasting and now with the proliferation of App-Phones and 3/4G mobile networks, we clearly have an opportunity to bring back the 'art' of radio.
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| In my opinion, you need humans to create art. That's arguable of course, but until my iPhone starts showing some emotion, I'm sticking by the statement.
In radio broadcasting, that art cannot be replaced by machines. Radio connects a community. This used to be almost exclusively communities of geography. Before the big Clear Channel roll-up of all local stations and satellite programming, DJ's, or announcers would connect members of the community by spinning requests, putting dedications on the air, promoting local events, discussing local politics, issues, birthdays, you name it, it was all local. But the art goes beyond that. A certain song played in connection to a local news story can also connect the audience with emotion. Even a record that celebrates the sun finally shining after weeks of rain is an example of radio really connecting people.
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| This simply cannot be achieved by a DJ in a Colorado studio broadcasting to 5 major markets as geographically and sociologically diverse as New York, Los Angeles, Austin, Boston and Phoenix.
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| There are of course mainstream radio stations that act as connective tissue for a community of interest. Network News Radio is a good example. A lot of NPR and other public radio programming does this quite well, unfortunately public radio in the USA and many other countries and markets have been hijacked by corporate interest, of not by the interests of the organizations that provide them with their grants and sources of funding. These guys all have nice offices, studios and CEO salaries to underwrite, so they have to be careful biting the hand that feeds them.
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| The iPod gave us all the opportunity to program our own musical radio experience, and although shuffle function provides some serendipity, it is a far cry from hearing 'Baker Street' by Gerry Rafferty right after the news of his passing hits the news sites.
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| A few months ago, several of the No Agenda 'producers' started working on a hybrid of programming a station for and by it's community embers. @gitmoSLAVE and @Gx2 cobbled together a number of scripts that would pull a list of songs from a shared DropBox into a audio stream on the server. The audience dropped songs into the box, and they would chat among each other in the chatroom about their choices. A truly global shared listening experience! Truly beautiful.
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| I have made it one of my missions for this year to bring that idea to scale. True public radio for the people by the people.
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| Now, in order to scale this idea, technology is needed. Without NPR like funding, there are no salaries for 24/7 staff to service the community. So this has to work with minimal input from many individuals, and most importantly, without a hierarchy of bosses who ultimately decide what is 'good for the audience'.
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| I will be documenting progress on our Open Source Radio project over the next weeks and probably months it will take to get any form of system functioning. There are so many parameters, bit technical and human, that make this a challenge. But the basic idea of pulling music and news managed by the audience and outing that into a rotation is already working and online 24/7 at noagendastream.com with the back channel also open 24/7 at noagendachat.net.
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| In order to identify what is happening on-air, there are automatic announcements about which dropbox music is playing from. The most exciting stuff comes from the OSDSC dropbox folder, which is co-managed by a group of about 50 people, who add, deleted all kinds of content, that is pulled into rotation multiple times an hour. Other 'slots' are filled by individuals who are highly motivated to keep their contributions fresh, completely eliminating the need for a programming or music director.
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| We've even got a 'newsreader' that pulls in headlines every hour from twitter sources.
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| As with most great experiments, you can expect this to burp, fart and break all over the place, but that's part of the fun, and you can contribute and help us make something that is the exact opposite of the direction the mainstream media is headed.
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| So head on over to the chatroom and join in the fun creating the sound of Gitmo Nation, with Open Source Radio.
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| Click on the nodes below to follow along with updates to the project
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|  | Project Outline Latest update: Wednesday, January 5, 2011 4:17:41 PM
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|  | Regular rotation
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|  | Every hour files are pulled from multiple dropboxes. The best way to get started is to ask gitmoSLAVE to join the OSDSC Freestyle dorpbox.com shared folder.
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| | If you think you can maintain a folder of at least 100 tracks and keep them fresh on a weekly basis, you will want to contact me to share a folder I can put into rotation
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| | Shared folders that aren't kept 'fresh' or don't contain enough items will be removed from rotation
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| | Special Programming
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| | The stream goes live for the No Agenda Show ( noagendashow.com) every Thursday and SUnday morning at 9am PST and for the Live Daily Source Code on either Friday or Saturday late morning/afternoon (pst)
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| | Playlisted Programming
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| | We will slowly be integrating special shows that consist of either pre-produced self contained files to be scheduled at set times, but equally exciting is 'shows' that are themed and scheduled to playback a list of tracks in order, again at set times.
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| | This is definitely a 'next step' for the station, but will need to wait until general rotation bugs are worked out.
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| | Imaging |
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Truly Public Radio! I'd like to see more of these OSRs spring up.
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