Be a Democaster
From DoWire Wiki
The final version of this page is located on the new Democaster website:
http://www.democaster.org
Imagine doubling the number of people "attending" your public event! Sure that might mean you had ten people in the room and ten listeners, but the benefits outweigh the very small costs.
Through at least June 2006, free Democaster accounts are available to up to 15 UK-based community groups and governments. This is your organisations chance to experiment with webcasting the audio and even webcam images from your public events.
With Democaster, you simply set up a webcast on the "producer" section of our website. You give it a title, time, and can even add an agenda and links to meeting documents. You also install some free software on a computer or laptop in your meeting room, put the unique Democast Number into the software settings. Now plug-in a decent microphone, or better yet, a line-in from your audio system and press the live webcast button. Democaster, using quality open source tools where possible, creates a webpage for your webcast and automatically shares the audio in Ogg and the popular MP3 format live and is automatically archived for "on-demand" streaming, download, even podcasting. If you have a webcam, you can even share pictures every 5 seconds from the room.
Possible "Democasters" include UK-based organisations with public meetings and events such as:
- Parish Councils
- Neighborhood Groups and Resident Associations
- Local Authorities - Particularly public meetings of small committees or task forces not scheduled for video webcasting on other providers
- Community and Voluntary Sector Groups - Particularly for your public events with speakers, community debates, even your board meetings if they are public
- Student Unions and Councils
Looking forward, our agreement with the Local e-Democracy National Project allows modest fees on a tiered basis estimated to be no more than 250 GBP a year for most producers. We also have the option to provide free or lower cost entry level services for low-volume users. Our goal is to make webcasting truly accessible and as easy as possible.
Sign Us Up
Contact Steven Clift, the Enhanced Webcasting Project Coordinator, via e-mail to start the process:
democaster@dowire.org
Tell us a bit about your UK-based organisation, the kinds of events you hope to webcast and their frequency. Preference will be given to groups with at least four planned webcasts in the next six months.
Not in the UK?
During this phase of Democaster, we'd like to experiment with e-democracy, e-government, Internet and society, community and neighbourood related events, speakers, and conferences. Democaster worked great with the International Symposium on Local e-Democracy and should we expand beyond the UK, we'd like to test out the system via a Democaster Conference series.
If you are an organisation like the ones listed above in another country looking for a service like Democaster, drop us an e-mail democaster@dowire.org to help us build our business case.