Let There Be Light

From darkness came social interaction. From social interaction came friendships and debates, knowledge and wisdom. Like many projects, the hardest part is where to begin. Let this be the beginning of the Unseen Studio project.

So what is this Unseen Studio project? In the tradition of the intro we'll start from the beginning shall we?

In the beginning there was darkness. A voice commanded "let there be light". Some rustling of fabric and clicks of flint later several voices were chatting away happily contended that someone could find their cigarette lighter in the dark. There was much relief. There was also a wild haggis called Hamish but since he demands publicity rights in this tale, we've chosen to rewrite his parts as a squirrel called Jonathon.

Not that far back? Oh alright then, let's skip forward a bit. So Al Gore gave us the interwebs, and stuffed into these tubes was a thing called Identi.ca. In this Identi.ca thingy there were users who chatted to each other. Is that better? Does that set the scene enough? Sheesh, nobody wants the novel anymore, they all want the movie with the explosions and attention span of a hyper intelligent goldfish. Anyhoo, on with the story.

A couple of throwaway comments on Identi.ca between myself and Kevie led to us deciding to do a Scottish themed Linux / FOSS audiocast together called Crivins. We are blending the post watershed language and humor in the style of Still Game, and applying that to the Linux world.

As we started throwing the idea about, looking at how to do it, what to cover, what to include or exclude, we decided it'd make more sense to do an audiocast network. It gives us flexibility further down the line. It allows us to do Crivins as well as Kevie's TuxJam audiocast in one place.

We wanted to provide some sort of resource for Linux / FOSS people in addition to our own shows. We've done this in a few ways but we need people to join up and contribute to really make this a treasure. Often we hear about some cool audio or videocast, news site or even event totally by chance. We want to help spread the word. We want to have a place where people can add cool stuff they like, so others who may also like them can find them.

We've applied that same thinking to projects who are looking for specific help, and people who have those specific skills but are unaware there's a project who need them, as they don't use that project. If you have a FOSS project and are looking for help, let us know. We'll add it to the classified section.

Initially we were going to incorporate the Free Culture Tracker into the Unseen Studio project but decided it'd be better as something separate, although much of the content overlaps.

Feel free to subscribe the blog, sign up for an account here and / or the forums, we'd love to hear from you. You can also follow us on Twitter or Identica with the account @unseenstudio. Things will change a little as time passes and we iron out some kinks. Our graphics master Kevie is still tweaking the logos and no doubt there will be some things we (mainly I) didn't think of but we'll get there. The important thing is "welcome aboard". We want to be as easy going as possible, so for now we have one general rule "don't be an arsehole".

Kevie and myself will be doing a TuxJam special in due course promoting the site, and when we get settled down we'll start with episode one of Crivins. Klaatu and myself recorded an HPR interview to launch the tracker project which can be found here.

We are pro free culture and pro free software. All of our content is released under a Creative Commons license.