The Interledger Community 🌱: Mark Boas

Hyperaudio for Conferences — Final Report

Mark Boas — Thu, 12 May 2022 10:32:50 +0000

Project Update

Creating a completely new platform for conferences was always going to be a big lift – it certainly took more time and resource than we anticipated. That said, our team is really happy with the results.

It looks the part, works well and we feel that we're ready to take things to the next stage. There's a lot to report so apologies in advance for the length of this post ☕

A Quick Recap

Hyperaudio for Conferences is a platform that aims to maximise the accessibility of conference content, while opening up new possibilities to repurpose that content.

We use machine generated transcripts and translations to increase accessibility, resulting in Interactive Transcripts and captions.

Although we're seeing huge improvements, the results of speech-to-text based algorithms are never entirely accurate and so we provide an intuitive editor to allow people to modify transcripts and translations.

Our transcripts are timed and we try to preserve those timings, even after editing.

Timings allow us to:

🌟 Highlight words as they are spoken (karaoke anybody?).

🌟 Navigate video by clicking on words.

🌟 Share snippets of text (with video attached!).

🌟 Repurpose by remixing using the text as a base and reference.

Partners and Allies

We partnered with a number of GftW grantees and sponsors:

The Permanent Legacy Foundation whose platform we're using as a media CDN giving us predictable video hosting costs.
New Media Rights who have been invaluable in providing legal advice related to media use.
MOVA who we liaised with to try out and and test the Hyperaudio Wordpress and JavaScript Libraries.
Creative Commons whose licenses we'll be using.
Mozilla Festival with whom we're currently piloting the latest version of Hyperaudio for Conferences with (see mozfest.hyper.audio).

Progress on Objectives

So let's take a look at the progress we made on our objectives.

Overarching goals

Our overarching goal was to provide a platform that allowed conference organisers to preserve, promote, repurpose and monetize their recorded content.

We saw Web Monetization as an opportunity to compensate existing content owners and incentivise the creation of new derivative forms of content.

Deliverables

In order to achieve all this we planned a number of deliverables.

Web Monetization

Our timed transcripts contain data pertaining to which user is currently speaking.

We can reference speaker data to know when to switch Payment Pointers, while people watch and interact with the video. The idea being that speakers will be compensated according to how much the part of the video they feature in, is viewed.

Once the transcript has been edited, conference organisers or editors can specify Payment Pointers for each speaker.

We have plans to take the Web Monetization aspect further by building in compensation for people who remix, share and edit content.

Transcript Viewer

One of the first parts of the system we built was the transcript viewer, this allowed us to test our API and make sure our representation of a timed transcript could be translated into an Interactive Transcript.

You can try out the Viewer by clicking on any of the following MozFest links:

🎈Activating Caribbean Digital Rights: Embracing Change in Digital Epistemology

🎈The Metaverse vs the Publicservice internet

🎈How to remote control a raspberry pi using web monetization

🎈How to write a 100-year plan

🎈Using Hyperaudio to increase accessibility of web-based audio and video

🎈Bright IDEAs: Embracing Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access in a Post-Pandemic Environment

🎈With what words should I speak? Impact of Voice technology on Language Diversity

🎈Ethical Dilemma Cafe 2.0

🎈The Grand MozFest Web Monetization Experiment - Getting Started

And here's an example of an edited translation:
Utilizzo di Hyperaudio per aumentare l'accessibilità di audio e video sul Web

Features we'd still like to add to the viewer include:

Multilingual Captions (coming soon!)
Select and share (coming soon!)
Full Screen Video Mode
Controls for altering Playback Rate

HLS

A quick footnote about our media format, we use the HLS format for video. This allows us more efficient "seeking" to playback points as well as the possibility to stream lower quality video as a low-bandwidth option.

Mobile

More people use mobile technologies to view web-based content than "desktop", for this reason we invested a lot of time making sure we can deliver a good viewing experience on mobile platforms.

Transcript Editor

When creating the Transcript Editor we had three main concerns:

It should be performant. It really needs to be fast to use, even almost imperceptible slowdowns in responsiveness can lead to a poor editing experience.
It should be easy and intuitive to use. Editing a transcript is a significant undertaking, we should make it as easy and enjoyable as possible.
It should maintain word timings. We adapted an algorithm created by the BBC to figure out word timings, no matter what you add or remove.

Speaker data is an important part of a transcript. We spent a fair bit of time getting the speaker input and selection to work the way we wanted it to.

Since automatic speaker id (also known as diarisation) is a bit hit and miss, an optimisation we felt worth pursuing was the downloading of the automatic live transcription from Zoom. Fortunately Zoom provides captions and associated speaker data in a standard VTT format.

License Transparency

We're committed to making licensing as transparent as possible and to this end we've built a Creative Commons license selector, which the editor can utilise before publishing.

The Remixer

The Remixer holds a lot of promise for repurposing content. It allows people to construct new videos just by moving text around, and so it's a very intuitive content-based way to assemble new forms.

Making easy-to-use tools can be hard and the Remixer is the most complex part of the platform to build. At MozFest in March I demoed an early alpha version and I'm pleased to say that we are on the verge of having a fully functioning version ready for people to test.

I sometimes (half) joke that 90% of our development time was spent on The Remixer! But remixing and repurposing content is at the heart of our platform, so we're taking the time to make sure we get this part right.

One of the great things about The Remixer is that it's an "on-the-fly" audio and video editor. That is to say that we're assembling the resultant mix as a type of playlist, where you can specify the start and stop times of items in that playlist simply by selecting text. No mixing down to a single file required.

Each item or snippet maintains a link to the larger piece of media it references, which means that not only can we present the context of any mix, but we can also allow remixes to be expanded as well as contracted.

It's useful to be able to remix conference material:

– It allows you to quickly make shorter and tighter versions of a talk.

You are not restricted to one source either, you can create mixes from different sources based, say, on a common theme.

We also have plans to make search results a type of remix. Search for a phrase or term and see a remix made up of paragraphs where that phrase is mentioned. This could also act as a base for a new remix. Wow – so much remix! Did I mention remixes are remixable and that you can remix the remixes?😬

As remixes can be presented through the Viewer you can embed those remixes into any web page.

Wordpress Plugin and Hyperaudio Lite

We're keen on users of the Hyperaudio platform to be able to reuse their data in other contexts. We go further than embedding by providing two libraries which can be used with an HTML representation of timed-transcripts and a link to the video.

Hyperaudio Lite is a lightweight JavaScript library that allows developers to create and customise Interactive Transcripts, which in turn makes up the core of the Wordpress Plugin making it easy for non-developers to do the same.

These open source modules have been [extended to support Web Monetization] and slowly improved upon, with the help from the Hyperaudio community.

We plan to support remixes in Hyperaudio Lite and to generalise the caption generation module, so that it can be used independently from Hyperaudio Lite.

Ian Forrester who works for BBC R&D has been experimenting with Hyperaudio Lite to Web Monetize DJ mixes so the artists can be compensated, he's calling it WebMix.

Check it out on his blog post – The incidental contact high mix.

Export, Embedding and Permanent Access

As part of our anti "lock-in" strategy we're committed not only to providing mechanisms to embed content from the Hyperaudio platform, but also more robustly to allow that content to be hosted and reused independently.Our collaboration with Permanent is important, because it means predictable video streaming costs. It's also makes a nice ad-free alternative to YouTube.

Since the data we produce includes both transcripts and media, we provide a way of exporting both representations, in coupled and de-couple forms. You can export as plain text, captions (in SRT and WebVTT formats) as well as video, audio or integrated media and transcripts.

Key activities

Community

An important key activity for us was the building up of community around Hyperaudio.

MozFest 2022

When we applied for funding we were not sure whether Hyperaudio for Conferences would be used and developed alongside Mozilla Festival – MozFest 2022.

I'm pleased to say that after a small and low-key pilot last year, the MozFest organisers were enthusiastic to experiment further with Hyperaudio this year and this has been invaluable in attracting an international community.

Although MozFest is an international festival, most of the content is in English, so there's a real appetite to translate content and it's great to be able to test out our internationalisation workflows with an international community.

Building a community is challenging, so it was a real benefit to have Mozilla's support, and to be able to contact the facilitators of all the amazing content that MozFest produces.

We ended up with 32 sessions to transcribe and translate. And some very enthusiastic facilitators who saw the potential for their content to reach a broader audience.

We also benefited from Interledger's support at the festival, becoming part of the Grand Web Monetization Experiment.

The work we're doing with the MozFest community is ongoing and we recently ran an "Editathon" so that we could meet each other facet-to-face while editing and translaing content as a group. We're planning more of these sessions which will culminate with a "Remixathon".

Ethical Aspects

Hyperaudio has a strong ethical position which we invested a fair bit of time in discussing and capturing. This position informs our design decisions and policies. As well as being an open source platform that encourages users to take control of their content (through the anti-lock-in features discussed earlier), we also want Hyperaudio for Conferences to be a safe space. We wrote a lot more about this in a separate post and many aspects are reflected in our Code of Conduct.

As we slowly roll out Hyperaudio, we want to be able to choose the conferences which we invite on to our platform. So one of the first things we put in place was a waiting list. I'm pleased to say that there are people on it!

Privacy

One important is that of privacy. With MozFest for example, we need to mirror their privacy policy, which means that after a certain period we need to take video content down, although we can give those videos to facilitators to use as they wish, as long as we mask participants' identity. Luckily we have the data to be able to do this automatically, the idea being to use the facilitator view and mute the audio, while providing captions. Also we advise using speaker names that don't reveal the speaker's identity.

Open Source

All our code is open source and available on GitHub. You'll also find issues and documentation there.

Communications and marketing

We have a newsletter with * checks notes * 182 readers, who we are keeping up to date with progress. Please join :)

We're also pleased to announce that we managed to change our old Twitter handle from @hyperaud_io to the much nicer @hyperaudio. Where we tweet from time to time. Please follow :)

We've blogged on webmonetization.org and I've blogged some more personal stuff on maboa.it.

During MozFest we put together the following resources as public Notion docs:

What’s next?

Phew! We've achieved a lot. The platform looks professional and slick and we have the main pieces in place which we were able to gain validation and feedback from the small community that we built.

We're ambitious and so we aimed high and we still have a bit more of the road to travel until we get to where we want to be. But we plan to build upon the momentum that we have, to add polish to the platform as we emerge from beta.

We also have plans to create a desktop application which will be able to submit content for inclusion in a new community area of Hyperaudio we hope to build.

What community support would benefit your project?

Community Activities

We'll continue to run Editathons, Translatathons and Remixathons for MozFest content. If you think you would be interested in participating, please contact me directly or join the #Hyperaudio channel in the MozFest Slack.

Conferences

It's been great to be able to liaise with Mozilla on MozFest, we want to keep the momentum going by working with other conferences.

If anybody knows of any other conferences that could benefit from Hyperaudio for Conferences, please point them towards our website, where we have a waiting list.

Further Funding

We aim to be a sustainable non-profit and so we'd love to hear about any further sources of funding so that we can move to the next stage.

It doesn't need to be confined to conferences, other applications of the technology include:

Educational (especially in the areas of Media Literacy and combating Misinfo and Disinfo)
Lecture Capture
Podcasting

Additional comments

Just wanted to say thanks to Annabel, Joanna, Laurian and Pio for dedicating so many hours to this project and our collaborators – Soledad, Nic, Ian, Sophie, Sofia, Sebastian, Priscila, Hillary, Pamela, all our 32 registered users (woo!), The Permanent Legacy Foundation, The MozFest Team, Nathalie and Art of New Media Rights and of course the Interledger team for making all of this possible.
❤️❤️❤️

Relevant links/resources

Hyperaudio Website
Hyperaudio for Conferences
MozFest Hyperaudio
Hyperaudio on Twitter
Hyperaudio on GitHub

Hyperaudio for Conferences — MozFest 2022 Web Monetization Action Plan

Mark Boas — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 09:04:30 +0000

Project Description

Hyperaudio for Conferences is a web monetized platform that helps make recorded conference material as accessible as possible. To do this we automatically transcribe conference videos, create interactive transcripts – providing tools to edit, translate and remix.

Often transcription is an afterthought, but we like to put transcripts first and use them to make intuitive interfaces for powering audio and video.

Remixing media from transcripts is straightforward and fun – we can further encourage the repurposing of content by adding a sprinkle of Web Monetization.

Images

The mozfest.hyper.audio home page.

The new Hyperaudio Remixer.

Web Monetized Resources at MozFest

Ways in Which I Am Web Monetizing These Resources

We want to encourage and compensate the content creators that use our platform – whether they are organisers, speakers or remixers.

We've figured out a way to proportionally stream payments to speakers or content owners. This means if somebody's content is featured in a remix, they will be compensated according to how much of that content web monetization enabled browsers stream.

Conversely – the creator of the remix receives payment when the video is not playing.

We also have the payment-pointer swapping mechanism implemented in Hyperaudio Lite and our Wordpress Plugin, so that users can also add web monetized transcripts to their own websites.

Post MozFest

We're trying out a very early beta version of Hyperaudio for Conferences by encouraging session facilitators to give us permission to add their videos to mozfest.hyper.audio

We're also planning a number of post MozFest sessions where facilitators and attendees alike can come together to edit and translate transcripts.

Once the content is in good shape, we'll open things up for remixing 🤗

Copy for a Tweet About My Web Monetized Resources at MozFest

Let's keep the #MozFest party going with @hyperaudio for Conferences 🎉🎉🎉

Time to revisit and remix some of those amazing sessions!! https://mozfest.hyper.audio

My Payment Pointer Supports this Internet Health or Social Good Initiative (optional)

Content creators who do not have a payment pointer, or wish to donate to a good cause will be asked to select from the list of social benefit payment pointers.

I'd Love the Community Support with this Project By ...

We'd love to hear from conferences that might benefit form Hyperaudio – please feel free to point them towards hyper.audio/conferences and our application form.

Let's Stay Connected (optional)

Check out our website.

Join our community on Slack.

Or sign up for our newsletter.

Additional Comments

Thank you for this opportunity! ❤️

Hyperaudio for Conferences — Grant Report #1

Mark Boas — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 16:24:44 +0000

Project Update

The official start date for this project was June 16th. Due to various members of the team taking holidays around Europe (myself included), we really didn't hit our stride until mid July. Now I'm glad to report that we're making good progress, although mid-December (our planned launch date) looks very close indeed.

Although it's an ambitious task to create a product in 6 months – what makes it feasible is that we've built some of the key components before. It's hard to believe but The Hyperaudio Project (as a concept at least) is 10 years old this month! 🎉 🍰

Technology does not stand still – the web has changed significantly since those early demos, and the technology we've used has changed to suit – which means we still have lots to do!

Progress on objectives

Planning and Organisation

We continue to refine the flow of the application from a high-level using Excalidraw.

We're committed to working in the open. Our GitHub repository is public, as is our Project Board.

Wordpress Plugin

"Russian doll" by Peter Becker is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We're happy to announce the completion of the integration of Web Monetization into the Hyperaudio Lite library and Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin.

Read more about it in this post Adding Web Monetization to the Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin

Or watch the video below for the details of how to use.

Transcript Editor

In our original timeline we placed work on the Editor before that of the Remixer, since then we've shuffled priorities around a little.

We decided that since the Remixer was really at the heart of Hyperaudio and also by far the most complex component – we should work on that first.

That said, we have commenced work on the Editor – some experimentation around maintaining decent performance without having to resort to pagination. Initial results are looking promising.

The Remixer

The Remixer is really what makes Hyperaudio special. The ability to combine content from a number of sources to create new forms is intuitive and actually a lot of fun (as we found out when we took Hyperaudio into schools). It also gels really well with Creative Commons licenses.

This will be the fourth iteration of our Remixer (orginally called the Hyperaudio Pad) – the most recent we created for the Studs Terkel Radio Archive. The version for conferences will include new features such as slides integration. We also want to make sure it's super easy to establish the source and context of any remix and so we're baking that right in. Essentially all remixes will come with "view source"!

This is a screen grab from a product we're using called Storybook which allows us to try out components as they are being developed.

The Remixer in Edit mode and dual pane view

The Remixer in single pane view with export options

Backend Infrastructure

There's a lot going on under the surface of Hyperaudio. We need to be able to transcode, transcribe and translate media to provide the raw material (timed transcripts) upon which Hyperaudio is built. We'd also like this process to be efficient and as cheap as possible. To this end we use an architecture that has come to be known as "Serverless", which essentially means that once this architecture is in place we won't need to provision, scale and maintain servers. The tradeoff is that we need to build things within certain constraints.

The good news is that we're very close to having our serverless pipeline up and running.

And then we have role management. If you squint, you can see that in our flow diagram above we have three types of role:

Organiser
Author / Editor
Viewer / Remixer

And we not only need to give differing permissions to each of these roles but also consider that the various pieces of media can have various permissions attached to them.

Branding and Landing Page

We had already established some branding for the new Hyperaudio family of products prior to running our pilot with Mozilla earlier this year.

Hyperaudio logomark & logotype

Hyperaudio larger logo idea

Hyperaudio smaller logo (and family) idea

As far as landing page content is concerned, we've been taking a look at what differentiates Hyperaudio from other similar platforms. It's been useful to establish our value propositions.

It's sometimes easier to understand what Hyperaudio is all about by seeing it in action, so we'll be combining our key value propositions with images, animations and videos on our landing page.

Also it's important to note that values should define tone. We talk more about our values under "Safety and Ethical Considerations".

Safety and Ethical Considerations

As a team and organisation we feel very strongly that we should could consider the various ways a platform can be abused and the implications for the users of that platform, before building it. (We'll write more about this soon as it merits its own post).

It's interesting to see newer companies that take advantage of AI starting to include an ethics page.

Pricing and Payment Plans

Nothing is set in stone yet, but we are considering keeping things simple and having annual plans. Most conferences occur annually and we hope that organisations will build upon each year's content when their new conferences come around.

We're also planning to team up with another GftW Grantee Permanent.org to offer plans where content can be streamed directly from a Permanent account and can be archived indefinitely, independent of having an active Hyperaudio for Conferences plan.

Plans will be based on hours of media and likely come in four sizes: 10 hour, 20 hour, 40 hour and 100 hour plans.

Discounts will be offered to non-profits, academic institutions and organisations working with underrepresented communities.

Routing and Subdomains

A quick note about routing and subdomains, which is a combined infrastructure and usability issue and something we decided while keeping an eye on having a family of products in the future. We have decided upon the following:

hyper.audio – top level domain where you find our family of products.
hyper.audio/conferences – landing page for this particular product.
mozfest.hyper.audio – example of subdomain for organisations signed up to any of our products.

Good news about our Twitter handle

We managed to get our Twitter handle changed from @hyperaud_io (which reflected our previous domain) to @hyperaudio. You should definitely follow us! 😊

Key activities

Our main GitHub repo resides at github.com/hyperaudio/hyperaudio

To play about with the latest versions of our components in Storybook – from the command line:

Clone the hyperaudio/hyperaudio repo and switch to develop branch.
Change directory to packages/remixer and run yarn
Change directory to then jump inside packages/storybook run yarn then yarn start.

The Storybook page should pop up in your browser.

The Web Monetisable Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin can be found at github.com/hyperaudio/wordpress-hyperaudio

The Web Monetisable Hyperaudio Lite Library can be found at
at github.com/hyperaudio/hyperaudio-lite

Happily we're starting to see Pull Requests come in from the general community.

Communications and marketing

Hyperaudio for Conferences and Grant for the Web (Blog Post)
Adding Web Monetization to the Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin (Blog Post)
Payment Pointers in Interactive Transcripts (Video)
Web Monetization in the Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin (Video)

In other news, our "Get early access" list has grown to 122 people. We're also tweeting quite regularly from @hyperaudio

We are planning more marketing activities as we get closer to release.

What’s next?

We're aiming to complete the media pipeline and solidify the API in the next few weeks and in parallel start to breathe life into some key components such as the:

Remixer
Editor
Translation Module

We'll also create some key mechanisms including:

Caption Generator
Rich Social Media Share and Integration
Web Monetization Integration

We've still to design and implement all those pages that make up the rest of the platform, such as the Media Dashboard, Web Monetization allocation and permissions system.

We need to wrestle with GDPR compliance and integrate payment mechanisms.

We'll finalise the website identity, content and payment plans and hopefully sign Memorandums of Understanding with our potential partners (for now Permanent.org).

Wow – that's a lot. 😓

What community support would benefit your project?

We'd be interested in hearing from any conference organisers who would like to use the beta version of Hyperaudio Conferences. So if you know anybody who wants to make their conference material accessible and multilingual, please reach out to us and them 😄
We'd really like to know what you think about our project. We're always happy to receive feedback!
Contact us if you think there's a way to collaborate. If you'd like to couple any web-based audio or video with an Interactive Transcript, we'd be happy to advise and give you access to our work-in-progress editor.
Oh and please follow us on Twitter and give our GitHub Repos some stars! ⭐❤️

Additional comments

Just a big thank you to the Grant for the Web initiative, community and to the Hyperaudio team – Annabel, Dan, Joanna, Laurian and Piotr.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

In case they're useful to others, we can recommend:

Adding Web Monetization to the Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin

Mark Boas — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 15:39:12 +0000

An overarching our aim with Hyperaudio is to provide a platform where users have control over their data and are free to export it a number of useful formats.

One of these formats is HTML (the web's markup language) – we represent our timed transcripts as HTML for a number of reasons:

🌈 Accessibility

Transcripts render and are readable without JavaScript enabled.

🌈 Readability

HTML has been designed to be human as well as machine readable.

🌈 Flexibility

Most web developers know HTML and can adapt it to their needs.

Here's a snippet:

<p data-tc="00:00:52">
  <span data-m="52890" data-d="0" class="speaker">Alexandra: </span>
  <span data-m="52890" data-d="90">I </span>
  <span data-m="52980" data-d="240">think </span>
  <span data-m="53220" data-d="720">unfortunately </span>
  <span data-m="53970" data-d="60">at </span>
  <span data-m="54030" data-d="60">the </span>
  <span data-m="54090" data-d="270">minute </span>

Hopefully this is relatively human friendly. We see the start of a paragraph containing a series of spans containing words. These spans have a start time (data-m) – in milliseconds – and duration (data-d) associated with them. (The paragraph's data-tc is optional.)

You can pretty much style these transcripts how you like - here's an example. If you view the source it should be pretty readable, and you might spot something interesting. Payment pointers.

Time for another snippet:

<article data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/123article">
  <section data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/123section">
    <h5 data-m="0">How do we make people more aware of their personal data?</h5>
    <p data-tc="00:00:04" data-wm="$ilp.uphold.com/123Doc">
      <span data-m="4470" data-d="0" class="speaker">Doc: </span>
      <span data-m="4470" data-d="270">We </span>
      <span data-m="4740" data-d="240">have </span>
      <span data-m="5010" data-d="300">two </span>
      <span data-m="5310" data-d="600">selves </span>

We decided to make payment pointers "portable" by making them part of the transcript itself. In the Hyperaudio Wordpress plugin (which relies upon Hyperaudio Lite) all that's required to make use of those payment pointers is to turn on Web Monetization in the plugin (or Hyperaudio Lite library) and include those pointers somewhere in your transcript, like the example above.

When playing back the media, Hyperaudio Lite checks the parent element of the current word and then the grandparent – and so on – until it finds a payment pointer. Once located that pointer is made active – thereby streaming payments to the owner of the pointer. In our example this means we could set a payment pointer for each <p> to divide payments amongst speakers. In the case that we don't have a pointer for a specific speaker (like Alexandra in the first code snippet) it will default to the next pointer it finds "above" it in the HTML.

Note – we can use a <section> element to represent component parts of a remix, so conceivably you may have some with payment pointers and others without (at which point it would default to <article>).

In the Hyperaudio for Conferences project we want allow the option to proportionally stream payments to individual speakers, including the case when conference material contains multiple speakers.

I'll finish with some videos to illustrate the concept further...

Web Monetization in Hyperaudio Lite

Web Monetization in Hyperaudio Wordpress Plugin

Feedback is always welcome!

Hyperaudio for Conferences and GftW

Mark Boas — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 09:40:26 +0000

As we open a new chapter with Hyperaudio thanks to GftW funding, I wrote a short blogpost on what we learned from the pilot with MozFest, why we're focusing on conferences, the fun we had with translation and a brief intro to our team.

https://maboa.it/hyperaudio-for-conferences-and-grant-for-the-web/

Hyperaudio for Conferences Pilot with MozFest - update

Mark Boas — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 09:47:16 +0000

For those interested I wrote a blog post on where we are with our pilot with MozFest. We're still waiting on a lot of content to be transcribed – to be published soon at mozfest.hyper.audio.

Hyperaudio for Conferences Pilot

Mark Boas — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 16:21:14 +0000

As we work towards getting our MVP of Hyperaudio for Conferences ready for the Mozilla Festival in March I just wanted to share a few early results with the group.

This short interview is a taster for a session which will be part of the Creative AI Space and uses the Hyperaudio Lite JavaScript Library which we're currently working on.

This is an example of Hyperaudio tech being applied to actual conference material.

Both examples include payment pointers. As we build the Hyperaudio for Conferences platform out we want to experiment with the apportioning of payments to all involved with creating a piece of transcribed media, whether it's the original content creators, the remixers or even the sharers. I wrote more about this in another post.

An idea around monetising “distributed” content

Mark Boas — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 12:30:24 +0000

Hi everyone!

(I originally posted this idea on the Grant For The Web forum and it was suggested I also post here...)

I'm busy re-applying for the grant, this time with a tighter focus – hyper.audio for Conferences.

Hyperaudio for Conferences will provide a workflow to create Interactive Transcripts for recorded conference materials – this is great for accessibility and internationalisation as transcripts can be corrected, translated, searched, shared, remixed, converted to captions and exported for inclusion in websites (using the Hyperaudio Lite library) or Wordpress (using our plugin). We'll also allow clips and remixes to be exported! All while respecting licensing that the conference organiser / talk author has selected.

The idea is that in exchange for allowing people to add Interactive Transcripts of conference content to their sites, we programmatically add a payment pointer to the head of the page the transcript is "embedded" in. Thereby creating a distributed way to collect payment for authors and organisers.

We'd do this by including the payment pointer code(s) in the export – the Wordpress plugin or Hyperaudio Lite library taking care of the insertion of the code into the head of the page.

It strikes me that this model may have already been considered somewhere on this forum (although I've yet to locate it), but I thought I'd put it out there just in case, as it might be relevant to other forms of content and so something that others could use or ponder on.

I'm especially curious to know if people have ideas about this and/or can think of any possible downsides or blockers :)

Best

Mark