There are always people in the radio audience who know more on the topics being discussed on the air. Open Source’s blog taps into that, and tries to get the experts on the air.

Tania Ralli, A Radio Program…, The New York Times, July 25, 2005

That was fun.

Glenn Reynolds, October 27, 2005, Instapundit

Open Source is a conversation, a few times a week via podcast and blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a podcast with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a podcast.

This means that we rely on our listeners and readers — whom David Sifry calls “the people formerly known as your audience” — to help us produce the show. At its most basic, we look for this production help in the comment threads of this website. Every time we have an idea for an interview we post it to the site. That conversation may not happen for another month, but we immediately start reading comments — suggestions for guests, questions for guests, suggestions for ways to frame the show or reading material — and following up on them.

You, the people formerly known as the audience, know more than we do. Frequent commenter razib understands — intimately — how DNA testing works; sidewalker sometimes weighs in about his adopted country of Japan; jeffakboston helped us with a list of theoretical physicists. So pick your handle and name your obsession. We’re reading.

And we’re watching the rest of the Internet, too. We look at every blogger as a “fixer,” a journalist’s term for someone with local knowledge, someone who speaks the language and can tell us who to talk to. Almost every picture on the site comes from the photo-sharing site Flickr, and we try to get the story behind the pictures, like the one taken from the 10th floor of the Fariyas Hotel in Mumbai. We found an IBM forum for our show on pensions. We spent an hour in the online world Second Life.

Conversations are happening everywhere on the web, and they’re not just about computers or Star Trek. They’re about God and the world, people taking pictures and and comparing notes of what they see around them. It’s why we chose to run our website as a blog; a blog functions naturally as a conversation, asking for input and correction and responding in turn. Broadcast media can’t just be a bullhorn anymore; it has to be an invitation, or it misses out on some of the best stuff happening around it.

Open Sourcewas conceived and developed by Christopher Lydon and Mary McGrath. A production of Open Source Media Inc., Open Source is presented in partnership with The Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.