The period for nominations to the first RadioDNS Steering Team ended on August 14th.
I am pleased to say that we have received 20 nominations from many countries across the world, and from broadcasters, receiver manufacturers, and service providers. This was far in excess of our expectations. It’s very good to see such a wide range of people able to make such definite commitments to the project. As one of the nomination criteria was also to be a supporter of RadioDNS, you can expect to see our Supporters page (at http://radiodns.wpengine.com/organisation/supporters/) get even longer.
The next stage is to make the difficult decision of whom should be on the Steering Team. The key criteria have remained the same:
- The Steering Team should be between 9 and 11 people.
- Each member must be able to commit to 8 working days in the coming year. This is particularly important as we have to define the rules for RadioDNS, and set up a legal vehicle under which to provide the service.
- The members must reflect the users of RadioDNS – both in business area and geographical location.
- The members must act in a non-partisan way, and in the best interests of all RadioDNS users.
In the last month we have taken very helpful advice from a number of experienced people about how best to manage RadioDNS, including how best to form the Steering team. That has confirmed our initial belief that only the specific RadioDNS process (that is, the translation of broadcast parameters to an Internet domain) needs to be formally managed, and more specifically, needs a legal entity to hold the “radiodns.wpengine.com” domain, to enforce control over the lookup database, and to handle costs & membership fees.
As the associated applications (such as RadioVIS, RadioEPG, RadioTAG etc) operate wholly in the IP domain, and are available equally to streaming and broadcast radio services, they do not need to have the same type of management as RadioDNS. We would expect the application authors and supporters to stay aligned to RadioDNS for their own benefit, but as a consequence we have kept these applications outside the strict scope of the Steering Team’s responsibilities. It is therefore likely that radio broadcasting companies, for whom the RadioDNS process is critical, will make up the majority of the initial positions on the Steering Team. Of course, we will keep that situation under review, and act on feedback from members and users to support and involve the application providers closely.
Above all, RadioDNS needs to be very cost-effective, and that means keeping the project costs at a minimum. Nobody envisages, at this stage, RadioDNS having any full-time staff or an office. The voluntary contribution of the Steering Team is invaluable in this respect.
We will be in contact individually with each nominee in the next two weeks, to either confirm their place on the Steering Team or to briefly explain why their nomination wasn’t successful. On the 8th September we will publish the names of the Steering Team companies / representatives, the date of the first (virtual) meeting and open the first agenda.
Thank you again for your continued support for the project, and please do send any questions to feedback@radiodns.org