Lika Sidibe at WADR
Last week, we released Airtime 1.7, our latest open source software for radio stations. It contained some of the top-requested features by users, including automatic recording and rebroadcasting of live shows and JQuery widgets to display schedules on radio websites. April 18th will see further community requests answered with with a faster calendar and the ability to edit a show included out-of-the-box.
Sourcefabric are back from Dakar where we've been working alongside West Africa Democracy Radio to implement a ground-breaking news platform. http://.www.wadr.org was launched last week and integrates Newscoop and Airtime installations with Soundcloud archiving, Disqus comments and Facebook networks. Site traffic is already much higher than expected and the radio is doing great work covering the breaking news stories in Côte d'Ivoire.
Sourcefabric was recently featured by Ushahidi (an open source project mapping project that's been grabbing headlines all over) on their blog. The Ushahidi Cooker is an ingenious Newscoop hack that provides a tool to easily create and manage libraries of maps and KML data that can be easily imported into a Ushahidi map. Micz Flor explored the potential of combining the user-generated realtime data of Ushahidi with the professional content management tools of Newscoop to build a powerful platform for crisis mapping.
We've been out and about meeting users and community members recently - training sessions in Vilnius and a presentation for the open source festival, Flisol in Guatemala have overseen a dramatic increase of user activity in the Russian and Spanish forums. The Berlin team will be present at re:publica all of this week (one of Europe's biggest blog and social media conferences) and at CivilMedia11 in Salzburg over the weekend.
The Airtime development team have been testing the DEB packages and filing tickets to improve our installation process for users, as well as working on various speed and usability improvements. The extra features implemented for 1.7 are being tested on the ground now and we're getting great feedback.
The Newscoop team have also been streamlining the software's interface, but have also been working extra hard on the Soundcloud plugin that enabled the WADR implementation. It allows journalists to upload and edit Soundcloud files on the fly from within Newscoop - perfect for radio stations with large audio archives or for news organisations with journalists in the field who possess the brilliant Soundcloud app.
We'd also like to welcome Vlad Nicoara who joins our Romanian development team and has already been hard at work squishing Newscoop bugs.
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