GISS

G.I.S.S. is an international network of free media activists, joining to build an infrastructure for free media experiences, radios and televisions like the Horitzo TV project (Spanish) in Barcelona. More concretely, right now the G.I.S.S. is an infrastructure with different components and tools for setting up an independent radio or TV channel easily.

New work to be done in the course of the project focuses on the following aspects:

• Improvement of the topology of the network: currently all transmissions are passing through a main server and the upload to that server is saturated, so we should introduce new main servers and rebuild the architecture of the servers.
• Development of a specific version of icecast: for now the version we use lacks some essential features for us like the encryption of IPs (anonymizing like requested by the Indymedia network), a more specific load-balancing mechanism (using the instant load of each server) and more complementary features regarding the master/slave configuration.
• The live CD is in a usable state, but it should be improved to include more audio-visual and streaminig tools, like Cinelerra, free, gstreamer and other useful tool for video editing and broadcasting.
• Another component of the system is a kind of 'mediabase' archive tool, similar to you-tube but using only free software and Ogg/Theora format. Although a prototype already exists, it should be improved and be customizable for every user. The new GPL package will be called 'Distributed Multimedia Database System' (DMDBS).
• Most of our activities are located in Europe and South America, we would like to extend that network to other countries (India, Bolivia, Morocco). We already have some contacts to organize some workshops there.