Conference of the Air at #OEGlobal24 (powered by ds106radio)

I’ve not made much noise about traveling, but for what its worth I am in Brisbane, Australia where my organization is hosting the OEGlobal24 conference. I have skipped the long flight, the cute koalas, to try and quickly publish something that for weeks has felt like a mad idea.

With a bit of virtual duct tape and help from the lovely folks at Reclaim Hosting for today’s first day I pulled off not only live audio streaming of sessions, but having available at other times, a collection of time blocks of content. It’s what I have hatched as Conference of the Air, the nod to the Australia distance learning innovation of School of the Air.

This idea percolated with conversations with Maren Deepwell and Meredith Fierro from Reclaim at the OER24 conference earlier this year in Cork, and was played out so well with their DS106 Summer Radio Camp this summer. Team Reclaim offered to support with set up and infrastucture using ds106 radio.

I had rather grand, wild, and now I can see as unrealistic plans. I really wanted to set up a means for people not able to be in Brisbane to contribute maybe something different from typical presentations in audio form. I hope to get some of the people who do broadcast to do some live shows during the week. I really did not get enough advance prep done on these parts, but hey, it is a trial run.

The motivation was in some part the time difference for the conference location. Even if we could do live streaming, for many parts of the world, the timing is off. My plan was not totally unplanned, I did sketch out a concept doc, which opened with the time issues:

I am hastily writing as there are two more days, so I hope I can garner some more listeners or reaction to the idea. For my time at OEGlobal I have pushed for creating avenues of participation in our conferences that is not the usual presentation-centric mode most people think of. I have coined it as the AND conference concept.

Enough blather, what is happening? First of all, with help from Taylor Jardin at Reclaim, I have set up their TV Guide like interface for having a schedule of planned live events, the radio player, and some information. So this is the place i send people to listen– https://bit.ly/oeg-radio

The “normal” mode of ds106radio is unless someone breaks in with a live broadcast, the station plays the stream from WFMU. I wanted to usurp that a bit, so set up a series of scheduled “Programmable blocks” of radio shows if you will. In the Azuracast system that runs the station, this is done by uplaoding audio files, putting them into playlists, and scheduling blocks of time for the playlists. The key learning was setting the priority to 1, lower the the WFMU stream, and also, an obscure advanced playlist option for “Interrupt other songs to play at scheduled time.” The playlists are longer than the blocks of time, and set to shuffle the order.

For simplicity sake the blocks extend all this week, but since the content is randomized, you can be too sure what you get. The blank spots are where WFMU will kick in.

Now this means this is the background unless I break in with a live stream session this week.

For the live broadcasts, I requested to have set up in the back of one venue room a sound feed from the AV board that comes into my laptop via USB. I also got an ethernet connection to not be mangled by wireless.

If it was me doing the streaming, Id use Audio Hijack, but I planned on having some volunteers doing the stream start and stop. I went for a simple but useful tool, cheerfully named “butt” (Broadcast Using This Tool). This is so I can have it run under a separate user account on the Mac. The only task for this is to click a “play” button to start and a another one to stop. Its perfectly fine for broadcasting if you don’t need to mix sources.

Another nice feature is you can have butt automatically record anything it streamed. Local archives!

So again for information, I have a listening and schedule of live events and elsewhere a summary of the scheduled blocks of shows. We put out some flyers with logos and QR codes to find.

I also am trying to do a bot of roaming the conference scene using the iziCast broadcasting app. It’s fun to do but for many people the scuttle away when you say, “Hi, would you like to say hello on the web radio?”

And I also had my big dreams of having on the Reclaim Hosting swag table (thanks for sending the post cards, they are lovely), an old radio with inside placed a bluetooth speaker and an old iphone to play the stream all day.

Finding an old radio was not quite easy, so I asked our graphics wizard Mario Badilla to create an image we could put on the front of a cardboard box. Mario went one better than box, and put together a make shift one with foam board. It is sitting on the table and playing all day long (one more listener!)

I am rushing this post a bot (and its been so long since I blogged I might have forgotten how) but I wanted to toss out before day two, and ask for thoughts on the idea, as Reclaim described it, as a conference on the radio or a conference AND the radio.

A post to wrestle on the way home is about the slide-centric conference foprmat!

If you have time in the next few days tune into Conference of the Air at https://bit.ly/oeg-radio

I have to get going and set up the radio station.

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Featured Image: Locked in to #ds106 Radio flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license modified with OEGlobal graphics designed by @mario shared under a CC BY license