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What does our block sound like? Hacking Airtime at the Mozilla Festival

What does our block sound like? Hacking Ai
What does our block sound like? Hacking Ai

This weekend in London, the Mozilla Festival will be alive with over 1000 participants looking to further the open web. Sourcefabric will be there in force, working on an exciting project initiated by the Broadcasting Board of Governors, called Our Block.

Edit: Session has been rescheduled. Takes place on Saturday 10 November at 2pm on 9th Floor of the Festival.

We're going to be trying to answer the question, "What does our block sound like?" Our Block is an HTML5 web application that enables individuals to come together to create and participate in the power and passion of neighborhood community radio. This digital community radio platform focuses on a continuous listening experience for sharing local news, information and culture while building audience participation through a real-time, collective social experience.

Using web, audio and service APIs along with, we hope, our open source software Airtime, MozFest participants will help define and hack new features to build a platform that focuses on real time continuous listening, a shared participatory audience experience and social community building.

Check out ! 

How can I get involved?

Anyone can participate in this project. Designers, broadcasters, developers or radio fans all have something to input, whether you are attending the festival or not.

First up, if you are at Mozilla Festival, then come to our session. It takes place on Saturday 10 November at 2pm on 9th Floor of the Festival.. Here's how it will work...

1. Unleash radio power. Participants will be introduced to our community radio platform app and discuss the power of local radio in their own lives, as well as use cases for communities around the world.

2. Ideastorm features. Together we will develop ideas for new features using individual idea-generation and a white board / sticky note exercise. A prioritised list of features will then be chosen by the group to begin developing.

3. Build prototypes. Teams will organise around each of the chosen features. Each team will build working prototypes with the goal of creating testable designs and working code.

I can't be there, but want to help!

No worries! We're using EtherPad to collect info during the session and the hashtag #ourblock on Twitter to communicate ideas and solutions.

We'll jump into the IRC channel on Freenode called #airtime too. Or, as always, you'll find us in the forums!

If you are a coder, some things you might want to check out before you arrive include the Airtime Github repo and the Airtime Dev wiki.

Much will be improvised and all input is welcome. Let's hack community radio!

What kind of things are you looking for?

Hacks might include...

  • Using Twilio or other VOIP and SMS services to allow messages to be recorded via phone and appear in the Airtime library
  • Using SoundCloud to pull cloud-hosted files into Airtime
  • HTML5 browser recording of voice messages that appear in the archive
  • Using Smart Blocks to programme user-generated content on-the-fly
  • Improving the javascript embed to provide more interactivity for radio station audiences

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