Comments on: Phonecasting in WordPress

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:54:01 +0000

@mwandani: Oh, please Sir, feel free! Anyone is welcome to link to anything on this site. Mind you, we still have to get this technology to work. Wish us luck!

By: mwandani

mwandani — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:01:18 +0000

Wow! never knew about this. Can I link this post in my blog. just to let others know as well?

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:47:29 +0000

Further conversations on Twitter yesterday led to some further suggestions. As they always do.

@bsains suggested the PostMaster plug-in for WordPress may get much of the work done in terms of handling email attachments.
@eddit0r suggested using the open source telephone system Asterix for switching the voicemail, rather than relying on third parties. My initial thought was that we don't have an Asterix-knowledgeable person on board at the moment and it's yet another system to configure in a short time, whereas mBox is 5 minutes to set up. But yes, Asterix's flexibility would be an added bonus in the future.

Any further thoughts? I know Jeff will be reading this at some point...

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:51:58 +0000

@Dean: The first two bloggers chosen do speak English, so that’s not a problem. However you’re right, outside the city English is little-used. Swahili was promoted as part of a push to develop a national identity from disparate tribes.

This does mean our first bloggers won’t be, say, poor farmers, but they’ll at least be a lot closer than me, or Western aid workers. One step at a time.

By: Dean

Dean — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:27:58 +0000

I think this is a great idea. If the folks you’re going to be talking to are already comfortable with their phones and the idea of voicemail messages, that’s most of your technical training sorted, right? They’ll just have to remember they’re leaving voicemail messages for the world.

I’ve been playing around with the AudioBoo app/service, but it’s reliant on the user having an iPhone, the app, a 3G connection, an account on the service and so on. Your solution sounds to me like it’ll work because it’s got an amount of platform independence; any phone that can dial the target number will work. I also like the podcasting idea because people would be able to record and share their thoughts wherever they are at the time (assuming they’ve got their phone with them at the time), rather than having to be near a computer.

But what about the language barrier? Wikipedia notes that use of English in Tanzania is diminishing in favour of Swahili, which might be a bit of a problem if one of your objectives is to have Tanzanians communicating directly with the English-speaking world. Would your proposed workflow have a community of translators elsewhere grabbing the podcasts and recording/transcribing English translations?

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:05:36 +0000

@andrewdotnich: I haven’t thought it through completely. I reckon the reports I do would just be announced in my own Twitter stream. This sort of thing will continue after I’ve done Project TOTO. The ActionAid people will have their own blog(s), so I imagine their own Twitter streams too.

Now that WordPress allows multiple instances of plug-ins, potentially there can be different categories of posts handled different ways.

By: andrewdotnich

andrewdotnich — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 01:40:34 +0000

Sounds (heh) like a great idea! Would you use the same twitter account for these impromptu-casts, or would you keep them separate?