Working open with the help of Mozilla and a repo

Great news: White Market Podcast was picked as a project as part of the latest round of the Mozilla Open Leadership program. This means that I am now getting training and mentoring that will enable me to make WMP an open project. So, we’re officially on the way to become an actually open project.

It’s not the first time I have tried to open up the show. Over the years, I have had the luck of sharing some of the hosting and production with other people for some time, for example. Last year, I also tried to make more content available in a freer manner as part of my efforts into making WMP a hub for community radio stations. While all these steps were taken towards a more collaborative show, WMP has always been a highly mediated product. Sure, I take feedback into account and often take music suggestions. Sure, social media (especially Twitter) has been a great tool to get some interaction around the show, but WMP’s community structure remains as one more of listeners than contributors. Hopefully, that’s about to change soon.

This will naturally come with its fair bit of challenges, changes and compromise, of course. Just a couple of weeks into this training and I am already wondering about changing the current Creative Commons licence attached to the show, and whether it still makes sense to play music with less permissive licences. I have lots of questions and no real answers yet, but surely with time things will become clearer.

For now, the first big step towards making WMP a collaborative endeavour is the brand new whitemarketpodcast repo on GitHub. At the minute, there isn’t much there, but I will start using it as a WMP’s go-to place for collaborative work. In a few weeks, you can expect a detailed roadmap, community guideline and other tools to keep things on track while working open.

As part of the Mozilla Open Leadership program, WMP will also be at MozFest! MozFest is the world’s biggest event for the open internet movement. WMP will be hosting a session about making open radio content. Why don’t you come over and say hi?

.: Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash :.