# Narrative report for last quarter of 2019
###### tags: `Documentation` `Report` `Quarterly`

Note: This version of the report for internal purpose which needs edits appropriately for publishing.

[TOC]

## Exciting October
Until Gerbern's visit i was busy on another website project which i had to hold for all the exciting things we had lined up to make during Gerber's visit. Along, we had many discussions around web annotations, and making browsers better, how fucked up is the current internet and so on.
One browser extension we worked on to test the browser bookmark storage api, is to highlight a text fragment in a webpage and book mark it, [checkout the detailed spec here](https://hackmd.io/SiRtGPn5Q8Gc9a4HgOcLHg) and [source code here with instructions to build](https://github.com/salus-sage/bookmark-selection).

After this experiment we were ready to venture into working with audio files, that would be of great use to us due to our shared dreams of making the web truly multimedia as against the current major text domination. So we published a firefox extension for **[bookmarking a audio fragment](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bookmark-audio-fragment/)** which initialises a player with features that enable to highlight and bookmark a section of audio, and the bookmark is saved in the browsers bookmarks storage, for retreival later.

It has now become much more evident for us that the amount of audio recorded in the radio project is growing in size and we need more ways and tools for managing this media centrally, but curate distributedly.
The need for the Radio project's recording pi's to have a curation interface, [New Papad spec](https://hackmd.io/O3QoYv9mQUWSR49gZ9qSDA)
Existing issue with current [Papad V1 version](http://papad.pantoto.org/) for Mesh radio use case is, it was not built as an offline first app, the dependency of authentication with google sign-in could be a overkill and break thinks when no internet is available.

And another discussin related to [Annotations on Radio](/buEfem2oRBuGrDPsKafQRg) around the same time Mike Jensen from APC pointed Girish and radio team to [RPI cassette player](https://blog.confirm.ch/mopidy-pummeluff-a-music-box-for-kids/) which further led us into discussions on [Radio Station Workflow Management using Mopidy](https://hackmd.io/padQsajJTsaz-K4kwEVwsw) which mentions Maaya - AV storytelling as one component.

This moment onwards i started to re-organize the earlier code written as part of maaya as just a [proof of concept](https://github.com/janastu/maaya-deprecated). More on this later but meanwhile, there was more brewing.

The dates for [Anthillhacks](https://anthillhacks.in/) were being finalised, December 07th to 20th it is. A 14 day event? i kept thinking to myself and was expecting more to come.

## Maayajaal November
As part of our long term interests in Stories and how annotations can help in composing visual narratives. [Re-story](https://github.com/janastu/restory-template) our earlier versions of the annotation mashups, evolved into [Maaya](https://github.com/janastu/maaya-deprecated) sometime in April 2019, as a proof of concept. The idea being, that there exists a naarative in audio format, which can be annotated with images and text that can play as an Audio - Video presentation.

It was utmost exploring and tinkering with the HTML5 video tag specs. What i newly learnt was that browsers natively support subtitle track in webVTT file format hooked to a subtitle attribute in the track tag. The Browser's Javascript api gives access to the caption cues data. That made me thinking that along with text input i can also provide an image path which i would switch in the poster attribute in an event listener that listens to the video timeupdate event.
voila! it worked, and also i chose to use Plyr - Open source js video player library, comes with a neat user interface for the video player, captions design control also handles the transition between posters smoothly.

It was time to make some stories to test.
First set of stories we made were,
* [Girija Kalyana](https://janastu.github.io/maaya/examples/gk-demo/);
* [Street Vending Pakka Legal - struggles of legal / illegal](https://janastu.github.io/maaya/examples/street-vending-pakka-legal/);
* [Give Our Drums back - Tribal stories](https://janastu.github.io/maaya/examples/give-our-drums-back/);

After making a few stories, we started to think about how far we could push this hack to achieve our goals. As soon as people start using, there may be requests for customizations, and feature requests, most expected during the event days. The main challenge would be authoring the [WebVTT](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebVTT_API) file for novice users of computers, which could be made simpler with GUI upgrades, and the next set of features like Frames composition with layers such as background, foreground, effects is on top of our pipeline for Maaya.

With the event days getting closer, we had to also look into other things that we needed to do. First up a website [anthillhacks.in](https://anthillhacks.in) with our sincere thanks to the [hillhacks](https://hillhacks.in) community, we forked their site's source code. Meanwhile, Dinesh was working on the content. We opened public registrations through and co-ordinating with the invites, planning logistics. Social media promotion on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon with Mani's help for managing, making posters and other content.

I guess i was reaching the end of a burn out phase and picked up fever, it was like a season of sickness and was down for almost a week, was totally unsure of how well i could be. Somehow we had to pull ourselves to anthillhacks venue, Devarayanadurga.

## Re-charging December
By some time around the 1st week, Emery came down from [...] to work with us.
All equipments were being packed to take back to Anterras.
Trying to juggle between shuttles for people picking up of equipment and all that.
We started off slow with small groups working with setup of libre routers and other groups setting up of Camping and tents.
A lot to learn with installation of the firmware, connecting the antennas all that by Nico's session.
By the end of day 3 we had one node setup on the old TB, and it was already late for the next node setup. So, we lined that up for the next day as the very first thing to do.
One node is up on the Namdu1Radio with clear line of sight to the ITB Node.
The last node setup at Ramya's house with line of sight to the ITB node.

One observation was that down in the valley all nodes may get good line of sight with the ITB node, but will be very hard to connect nodes within the valley using the wifi, die to foliage and trees, or may be finding of high spots to setup the nodes in the valley. However that is for us to explore in the coming days. Hooray! we streamed radio from down the valley at Iruway to top Anterras. The Birth of Internet.

While not all of Anthillhacks was techie thingy, not sure why i felt compelled to say that out though. Apart from laboring and birthing of the internet, many of our friends who joined us at the event to make it a beautiful experience. Thanks.
There were workshops on Natural Colors, Natural Soaps and shampoo, Crafts and talks on internet privacy, gig economies, Gender equality, Indegenious rights. There was music singing and camp fires.
There were Games and Treks
Discussions and arguments
Collaboration and co-operartion
Ants on the [Anterras](https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/360705536)

Twoo weeks event i thought, well there goes by a week already in a blink of the eye.

Node 1 -- ITB Mesh -- DD Mesh

Node 2 -- Crafter space -- Iruway mesh

Node 3 -- Ramya House -- Durga Mesh

Event days and highlights router setup may be connect to history till 12th.
8th missed most of the day,
9th to 11th Libre router setup days
10th FSMK ppl came mafia night
11th shilpa n team, ram's session, late night Ritu and some def ppl came,
12th full moon night, alekhya's birthday
Post event days, cnx day 0