autonomo.us podcast coming soon

September 26, 2008 in administrivia by evan | 4 comments

One of the things we’re planning for autonomo.us over the next few months is production of a podcast on a monthly basis. We just recorded our first episode on September 18th, the 6-month anniversary of the “mini-summit” meeting that launched the Franklin Street Statement and the autonomo.us group. Many of the original summit attendees called in to talk about the state of Free Network Services and the future of our project.

Our next episode will be an interview with Jimmy Wales and Gil Penchina of Wikia. Wikia is working on a Free and Open Source search engine service, with Open Data. Dubbed Wikia Search, it seems to be the closest thing that we have today to a Free Network Service for search. We’ll be asking Jimmy and Gil about their plans for Wikia Search, the underlying technology, the licensing for software and data, and the involvement of the great Internet community in their project. I’m also interested in their take on Free Network Service businesses, since Wikia is one right now.

The episode after that, we’ll have on Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, to talk about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia is probably the most popular Free Network Service on the Web, and we’ll talk about Brion’s dedication to using 100% Free Software for this massive Web site.

Future episodes? I’d love to talk to folks from Automattic about WordPress.com and their other services. Maybe a round table on the Affero GPL? Distributed programming models? Libre Services?

If you have any questions for our upcoming guests, or you can think of other subjects or topics we should cover in future podcast episodes, drop us a comment here and let us know. We’re interested in exploring the space around Free Network Services and I think we’ve got some interesting discussion ahead of us.

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  1. evan on October 1, 2008 at 11:47 am

    I’ve started an article on our wiki for brainstorming about the podcast: http://autonomo.us/wiki/Podcast

  2. pfctdayelise on October 6, 2008 at 9:22 pm

    OK, what is with this “login to comment” crap? Are you guys just talking amongst yourselves here or what?

    As for the podcast, it was very enjoyable and interesting, although the audio levels could have been more even across different speakers. At least y’all somehow know not to speak over each other.

    BTW there doesn’t seem to be an obvious page that describes/lists who “we” are. It was hard to tell from the podcast. It would be useful to have a bios page somewhere, for context at least.

  3. evan on October 7, 2008 at 2:00 pm

    @pfctdayelise: I dunno what we can do about that login-to-comment thing. We’re pretty much pikers when it comes to adminning WP, and it probably shows. I’ll ask Mako to check it out.

    Glad you liked the podcast. I think the levels needed to be adjusted, too: hopefully episode 2 sounds a lot better.

    The “about” page here lists current participants. Not easy enough to find?

    We should probably .have avatars, full names, and links to bios on the posts. Good point. Not sure how to do that with WP (again).

  4. pfctdayelise on October 8, 2008 at 1:46 am

    Evan, I meant on the wiki. I somehow didn’t scroll high enough to even find the “About” link, I just followed the link to “autonomo.us wiki”.

    the more wiki the better, I usually find :)