Sourcefabric is teaming up with Mozilla, the non-profit organisation that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the web, to reinvent audio and the news.

Two festivals will focus on improving audio workflow and web tools for journalists: Mediafabric in October and the Mozilla Festival in November.

The outcomes from the Prague jam sessions will fuel design challenges at the Mozilla Festival.

On October 21 in Prague, Sourcefabric will take ten global experts and ask them to present ‘visual essays’ to journalists, editors, technologists, developers, designers and hackers. Over the following two days of Mediafabric, these visions of the future will be turned into blueprints, prototypes, and tools that journalists can use.

(What’s more, we've launched a global news design contest to give designers a chance to showcase their winning entry to news professionals at Mediafabric, with free flights, hotels and VIP tickets thrown in.)

We'll then be at the Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom and the Web, which takes place on November 4 - 6 in London and will revolve around design challenges; ambitious yet achievable chunks of web-making. Five floors of maker labs will burst with people bending, hacking and building things in real time.

We’re keen to see what comes out of Prague and to continue the hacking on audio at the Mozilla Festival! Be sure to check out the Hyperaudio track:

Experimental hyperaudio players are syncing images, comments, and animated transcripts to audio files. These players let audio files manipulate web content, but not the other way around.

Can we start to make this a two-way flow? Can we change an audio file by manipulating its time-synced transcript? Build an editor that automatically edits audio files according to changes in its transcript.

This article is cross-posted at Mozilla's festival blog.