CHIRP Radio in Chicago is looking for someone to help us build a custom Android application so that our listeners can have a better experience on their Android phone. There are already a few Android apps for radio but they are clunky. Also, we have some plans to better engage listeners on phone apps with currently playing tracks, click-to-request-a-song, and other ideas like that.
We already have a pretty slick iPhone application created by volunteer John Carlin and after only a few months it already has 1,000+ downloads. John is hard at work building out nifty features like the ones mentioned above. If you like the app, be sure to thank him!
This is a nice opportunity to become a part of a popular and growing community radio station. CHIRP is a non-profit organization run by 200+ passionate volunteers and broadcasts 21 hours a day, 7 days a week and currently gets 25,000 listeners a month. The average time a listener stays connected to the station is 45 minutes, which is pretty long for radio.
Ideally we are looking for a volunteer programmer who wants to trade his/her time for becoming a part of the CHIRP movement. Volunteers who contribute time may train and/or audition to become a CHIRP DJ. However we do have a budget of donor funds to work with and thus can pay for services if that is the best fit for how you want to work. It would also be ideal to find an Android developer who is familiar with the streaming audio APIs and one who has the ability to test on a plethora of Android versions and devices (shudder). Keep in mind that we do have a lot of volunteers at the station with Android phones at your disposal for testing.
We will request that all code is released under an open source license so that outside contributors can participate and so that CHIRP can freely maintain the code. This is how CHIRP develops other kinds of custom software. If this is not possible then CHIRP will need to be granted a lifetime exclusive license or something like that. Speaking of open source, there is a lot of opportunity for collaboration between community radio stations. In fact, NPR has open sourced their Android app so this might be an excellent starting point. It even has a test suite! Awesome. WFMU also has an Android app and we have exchanged some emails with them about getting some open source collaboration going.
Send me an email if you're interested: kumar.mcmillan@gmail.com