GRINS v0.2 release and award
Aaditeshwar Seth
We are very pleased to announce two terrific milestones. Just today,
we were awarded the special Juror's Distinction Award in the 2009
Manthan Awards for technological innovation for development. And two
days back, we made the second release of GRINS, our broadcast system
for community radio stations. This builds upon the v0.1 release we did
in June 2009 by adding support for telephony, backup, and log-
shipping, plus smoothing out many user interface issues. Having a
single console to schedule broadcast, make and receive phone calls,
archive live speech and manage content sets GRINS apart from any other
commercial or open-source radio broadcast software available so far.
The current support for live telephony allows the radio jockey to
receive phone calls, converse with the caller, and optionally put them
on air. Conferencing can also be set up across multiple callers if
more than one phone line is available at the radio station. This means
that the radio stations can do interesting applications, for example,
have a doctor stay on line and invite community members to call and
ask questions, or have agricultural experts and mediators stay on line
and answer questions, etc. This also means that syndicated broadcast
can be enabled across multiple GRINS stations by having them call each
other!
In future releases, we will add support for SMS and Internet
connectivity.
To read more about GRINS and download/installation instructions,
please visit our website: http://gramvaani.org/news/software/
GRINS is open-source and available free of cost. GRINS v0.1 has been
running at Radio Bundelkhand, a CR station in central India, since the
last few months, and we will do a few more installations at other CR
stations soon.
We now need all your help to publicize GRINS in community radio
stations around the world, and solicit any help from the open-source
community to extend GRINS and localize it in other languages.
regards
Aaditeshwar
Gram Vaani Community Media
http://gramvaani.org