open source – Frontline Club

Mozilla launches Popcorn Maker, a Web-based remix tool

Al Willmott — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 10:30:29 +0000

This weekend at Mozilla Festival London, Mozilla launched its Popcorn Maker tool.

Based on the Popcorn.js library, Popcorn Maker allows users to pull web-based elements like video, text, images and maps into a timeline. This is an early version of the Popcorn Maker but it is promising because it uses open standards like CSS and HTML 5, is free to use and is browser-based. This sets it apart from proprietary tools such as Flash.

This is an example of what the young hosts of WNYC’s Radio Rookies made with Popcorn Maker:

http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/y7_

You can remix the Radio Rookies’ piece here to get a sense of how Popcorn Maker works.

Workshop: Radio in a Day

Millie Cartwright — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 10:09:16 +0000

The Frontline Club and fellow independent journalism pioneers, Sourcefabric, have joined forces to bring you this one-day workshop on how to build your own online radio station using Sourcefabric’s Airtime.

Airtime is an open-source radio automation software that lets you schedule, manage and run a radio station remotely and collaboratively. From crowd-sourced online stations to FM broadcast in hostile environments, Airtime can be used in many diverse situations.

So, whether you are an experienced broadcaster, or a journalist looking to hone a new skill, this workshop will be able to guide you through the following:

1) Understanding Airtime, and how it can be used to manage your radio station

2) Becoming an Audio Journalist and understanding audio recording techniques

3) How to network with other journalists to produce compelling radio

Included in the price of the workshop is a three-month free trial of Airtime Pro. Attendees will be automatically registered prior to the workshop. Airtime can also be downloaded for free and installed on your own server, here.

Attendees should bring a laptop to the workshop if possible. Participants are encouraged to bring their own .mp3 or .ogg recordings on USB media, or a USB compatible audio recording device to work with during the day.

Workshop schedule:

10-11.30: Introducing Airtime – the basics

11.30-11.45: Coffee break

11.45-1.15: Using Airtime to build a radio station

1.15-2.15: Lunch Break

2.15-3.45: Becoming an audio journalist

3.45-4pm: Coffee Break

4-5pm: Building a contributor community and networking with audio journalists

The facilitator for the workshop will be Daniel James from Sourcefabric. He is responsible for reaching out to the developer community and writing manuals for their software.

The workshop will be held in the Forum on the second floor of the Frontline Club,13 Norfolk Place, London, W2 1QJ.

Tea & coffee will be provided.

Covering the Marines on Facebook: embedded journalism goes open source

Daniel Bennett — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:57:42 +0000

Teru Kuwayama is embedded with the U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, but he’s not there with a traditional media organisation. He and a team of photographers are using funds from a Knight Foundation grant as part of an experimental project covering 1/8 battalion’s deployment in Helmand province.

The team’s photographs and material relating to the deployment of the Marines are published on a WordPress-powered website and pushed through a Facebook group.

On the group, friends, family and interested parties can comment on the photos. In an interview in the New York Times, Kuwayama says the project creates a:

"pipeline between 1,000 Marines working in very austere, isolated conditions in southern Afghanistan and connect[s] them to their mothers, their fathers, their wives, their girlfriends, their husbands and their kids."

Because of difficulties transmitting photographs from some parts of Afghanistan, Kuwayama notes that the project has come to rely on the collaboration of those connected with the Marines who create and post their own content.

A "network of technologists, analysts, artists, and journalists" also contribute context about the war in Afghanistan. One of the aims of the project is to demonstrate and develop an open source web-based system called Basetrack which can be used to support reporting projects.

Asked whether this is the new journalism, Kuwayama replied "it’s a question of how you define journalism. You constantly hear these lamentations about the death of journalism. It doesn’t look like that to me. It looks like the birth of journalism".