Feathercast was once, and perhaps can be again, an effective form of outreach for Apache. Feathercast needs your help.
What you can do: If you're not familiar with Feathercast, go to http://feathercast.org/ and listen to a few episodes. We have interviews about many of the lesser-known ASF projects, describing in (I hope) layman terms what the project does, who it's for, who's using it, and some of the human interest around the project. Then tell your friends, Facebook friends, or Twitter followers about the episodes that you thought were particularly informative. If you like to talk about your project, email me, and set up a date/time for an interview. This can happen over Skype or phone. I take care of recording it on my end. If you are curious about some project, and you want to be the interviewer, get Skype and a Skype call recorder. There used to be just one - a commercial product - but there are now several free ones too. I haven't tried any of the free ones, so can't vouch for how well they work. The one I use is http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/ and it costs $20. I'm sure the others are just as good - I just haven't tried. Get a SkypeOut account so that you can call regular phone numbers from Skype. Then arrange a time and call someone on that project. Interviews should be 20 minutes or less. This typically edits down to 10-15 minutes, which is all most people can stand to listen to. If you like editing audio, there's pretty much always some raw audio that I need help editing. In the case of ApacheCon session recordings, you just have to rip off the leading and trailing noise from the session. In the case of interviews, you need to go through and edit out all of the um's, ah's, you know's, and irrelevant side comments. This is time consuming - figure 2 minutes for every minute of audio, unless you're more of a perfectionist than I am. You can use Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) which is free and easy to use. There's also a musical intro, composed by Bertrand, which we tack onto the beginning. If you'd like to edit the remaining ApacheCon session recordings, let me know and I'll point you to the raw audio. If you'd like to be one of the main voices of Feathercast, I'd be glad to add you to the admins list. If you'd like to do something else for Feathercast that I haven't mentioned or thought of, please just let me know. -- Rich Bowen rbo...@rcbowen.com :: @rbowen rbo...@apache.org
