Festival2012/Submit/OurBlock

Our Block – A Community Radio Platform

Name and affiliation:

Adam Martin, Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG)

Session Format:

Design Challenge

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

Help 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 open source software, 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.

How do you see that working?

The session will be split into three parts:

• 1) An introduction to community driven, neighborhood radio and our platform application.
• 2) Defining new goals and features for the platform
• 3) Making a working prototype.

Part 1) 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.

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

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

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

Part one will be done as a collective group and then, depending on the number of participants we will do part two either as a group, or form smaller teams and define a new feature idea in each. In part three, teams of 3-5 people will work on developing a feature chosen during part 2. The more teams we have, the more features we can prototype!

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

About 20 minutes

The part one introduction and discussion will be about 10minutes. In part two we’ll spend 10 – 15minutes developing ideas for features and forming teams. The remainder of the session will focus on the teams creating designs, writing code and developing prototypes

Participants from the session will be able to drive future prototyping of new features and collaborate with others by staying connected to the project through our online group and our open source code repository.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

Teams will all share their demos at the end of the session and the BBG team will use these prototypes to continue developing our open community radio platform. Features prototyped during the session will be developed into a beta product that will be released in 2013.

Our goal is to develop a new service that provides individuals from around the world who share a same neighborhood, tribe, village or community a way to engage with one another collectively through news, information and cultural experiences. We will use the power of the human voice and the openness of the web to help answer the question, ‘what does our block sound like’?