As most of you know, the Ypsi Mayoral Debate takes place this Thursday evening at 7:00. The Ypsi Votes site is handling lots of traffic, we’re getting some good questions submitted from the community, and a lot of the people that I meet on the street tell me that they’re planning to attend, so I’m thinking that we might have a pretty good turnout.
So far, the publicity has been good. WEMU recorded a piece that will be airing this week, and I believe the “Courier” has some kind of coverage in the works. The Sidetrack has put table tents out, announcing the event, and the Corner Brewery has put an announcement card in their menus. And, as I mentioned last night, a lot of other coffee shops, bars, restaurants and stores have allowed us to post flyers. I doubt we’ll get the same kind of turnout that we had for the Shadow Art Fair, but it won’t be for lack of trying. We’ve got a great team of volunteers in place and they’re busting their asses to get the word out, and to make this a great, substantive event.
The planning committee got together on Friday night to touch base, and I think we’ve got almost everything in place by this point. There is one fairly sizeable hole though. We still need someone to record the event and help us to release it as a podcast. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested, please leave a comment or send me an email. Your contribution would be greatly appreciated. (And, the best part is, you don’t even have to be an Ypsilantian! We’ll take volunteers from anywhere, so long as they’re fully clothed, know what they’re doing, and value the democratic process.)
All isn’t necessarily lost if we can’t do a podcast. Sam Abuelsamid has agreed to come out, videotape the proceedings, and post them on You Tube, Google Video, or some other free hosting site. (Sam’s 11-year old son, Max, by the way, has a pretty cool music podcast. (For those of you at Zombie Claus ’06, he was also our youngest zombie.)) So, there will be a way that some people can access the content if they aren’t there on Thursday night, but, if at all possible, we’d like to give them an audio alternative. (I’m sure we could find a way to separate out Sam’s audio feed and release it as a podcast, but I think it would be safer to have another person there recording for that purpose, just in case something were to go wrong.)
5 Comments
Mark, I think you explained this earlier, but what exactly is the audio setup going to be? Is everyone going to be miked, and fed through a sound system? If so, and if said sound system has a way of plugging into a standard headphone jack, then one could just use an mp3 recorder to grab that signal.
I don’t have an MP3 recorder, but, you’re right, there should be a way to patch into the board of the person doing the sound. I just don’t know how someone would go about doing that… I also think that it’s probably smart not to count on being able to work with the sound person. An MP3 recorder on its own might be able to do the trick though, regardless of whether it can patch in to the board… I guess I could go out and buy an MP3 recorder if no one comes forward to help.
Mark
If I can jack into the sound board I can grab the audio separately and put that up on my blog feed at http://sam.abuelsamid.com/feed/ as podcast. I have a second small camcorder that I can use to record the audio and feed that feed that directly into the computer so we don’t need an mp3 recorder. I’ll put the video up on google and ourmedia.org. Who is doing the sound setup for this thing? Can you have them get in touch with me so I can get the details of the setup so I can make sure that I have everything I need. Also how long do you expect the debate to last?
Julie has an italk for the ipod and it has a mike input. So I can use that to capture the audio from the board. I just need to know what outputs are available so that I can make sure I bring the right adapters.
Very cool, Sam. Thanks… I just sent a note to my contact at EMU. With any luck, I’ll have the name of the AV person by tomorrow morning.
As for how long, we’re going to do everything we can to keep it to 2 hours. (The last half hour of that is going to be the non-mayoral candidates giving their two-minute stump speeches.)