Todd Mundt

Our second week of work was shortened by the holiday, but it was no less intense. We plowed through a lot.

For those of you who think this group is spending all of its time talking about system politics, using high-minded, mission-laden language, let me help you understand that this is not the case. The discussions can never be truly separated from the sense of mission that’s propelling us forward, but a lot of the talk is nerdy and geeky.

Here’s why.

We’re not thinking about creating The Big Thing. When we talk about the “it” or “the entity” (sounds like a Star Trek villian) that we want to create, what we’re talking about is a set of technologies, much like the NPR Podcast Project is a set of technologies.

In fact, the Podcast Project is a great example, so let’s think about it for a moment. There’s basically a system to take in podcasts, check them for errors, stitch an open and close on them, and ship them out through a variety of means, including an i-frame that stations can easily insert in a web page. There’s also a system to market the podcasts to potential underwriters, collect the money and disburse some of it to the participants.

Our work is very similar, except on a larger scale. It starts with a core problem: the experience that public radio listeners have online is nowhere near the seamless experience of national and local programs that listeners enjoy on the radio. The search box on public radio websites only searches that website at best, and sometimes not even that well. You hear a feature on the radio and you want to hear it again - well, good luck finding it in the web of local site, national site, program site. For most of us, our effort to provide top quality service on air is undermined by bad service online. So if you start from the premise that you want to make all public radio sites stronger, with more content, an easy way to search everything, access to all kinds of audio - local and national, or access to a lot of news and music - - - what you do is you create technologies to make it possible.

You don’t build some entirely new thing. That’s the last thing this overbuilt public radio system needs.

What you do is build a set of technologies - little agnostic bundles, I’ll call them - that by themselves aren’t “things” but enable all kinds of things, when networks, stations, and producers use them to create something.

That’s not a very elegant way to say it, but that’s what we’re doing. Do you get it?

If you’re KUT in Austin, have you thought about what you could do if there were standards in place that allowed you to share your huge library of concerts with the library of WXPN in Philadelphia, and export that master library to any other Triple A station that also had stuff to contribute? If you’re Iowa Public Radio, have you thought about how you might benefit if you added KUNI’s in-studio performances to that library and, in return, could offer on your website, the entire library?

If you’re Michigan Radio’s GLRC environmental unit in Ann Arbor, have you thought about making yourself the major environmental news source for public radio - with your own content, and news and audio feeds coming in from stations across the country, available on your own portal website, and available as a feed for all GLRC stations to add to their website? Have you thought about how many more eyes and ears would be exposed to your stuff?

What if you’re a small station and you don’t have a lot of original programming to offer but you want your web site to tie your listeners in to classical music across the country? What if you could access classical music content from around the country and choose what you wanted to offer through your website?

What if you’re a station that’s really interested in the podcast project but you want to maintain your own brand? What if the technologies this process enables could allow your local brand to be on every podcast your listeners get, from NPR’s Story of the Day to KCRW’s The Business?

In other words, have you thought about how much stronger you could be, how much more service you could provide to your audience, how much stronger you could be as a local brand, if you had the things your listeners wanted, available to them, on your website? Do you think your listeners would be more loyal to you over time? Do you think your content would find new audiences when it appears on other public radio websites and on other devices? Have you thought about the impact this might have on your membership revenues, not to mention the other revenues you might receive because of content and sponsorship deals we’re able to make because the value of our aggregated content is so great?

See what I mean when I say that you can never completely escape mission when you talk about this? On Friday, we spent three hours talking about servers, routers, backbones, cost per gigabyte, interface design, customer relationship management software, and Oracle databases. That’s the true work of the DDC Group right now. We’re not trying to creat the end - we’re trying to create the means. If we’re successful, you will be able to use these means to create world-class services for your audience.