Developers Needed for a Rich-Media Bridge between the

Soliya is a young nonprofit organization using the latest in new media
technologies to bridge the divide between young adults in the West and the
Muslim World through a unique cross-cultural education program called the
Connect Program, and we are looking for developers to work on building the
next generation of our online application.

The name of the organization, Soliya, derives from the integration of the
Latin word for Sun (Sol) with an Arabic word (iya) which means light. We
like to think of our organization as shedding light on the relationship
between the West and the Muslim World in a way that promotes better
understanding, mutual respect and cooperative action.

As part of the Connect Program, students communicate weekly through an AV
web-conferencing system we assembled that enables students to see and hear
each other in real-time as they get to know each other over the period of a
semester and explore together the difficult issues currently dividing the US
and the Muslim World. To date, more than 200 students have participated in
the program from 16 universities in the US, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Kuwait,
Morocco, and the Palestinian Territories. But this is just a small fraction
of what we believe the long-term reach of the program will be. At this point
however, our web-application is somewhat limited and we are looking to
develop the next generation of that application so that we can take the
program to scale in the coming years and provide thousands of students a
semester with the opportunity to communicate and collaborate in a rich-media
environment.

The application should amongst other things enable participants to
communicate in small groups with real-time audio and video throttled
accordingly to the available bandwidth with a strong priority on audio, and
it will have a sophisticated Learning Management System that will enable
students, professors and Soliya staff to upload, view and edit online
resources such as documents and media files. It is possible that we will be
able to use significant parts of the Learning Management System that we've
already developed, but we'll probably want to build the real-time
web-conferencing app from scratch.

We are in the process now of looking for talented developers who might be
interested in working on this project. We are open to various technologies
or platforms but begin with a bias towards working with Skype, Flash
Communications Server and potentially Drupal for the Learning Management
System. Also, I just wanted to note that the audio latency with FlashCom
based applications has been problematic with multiple streams (8-10) in our
experience, so we will most likely not want to use a system that depends on
FlashCom for the audio transmission. We would be more interested in some P2P
solution for the audio such as Skype.  Working on this project would also be
a unique opportunity to work closely with two pioneers in the development of
web-applications - Jeremy Allaire and Adam Berrey, both of whom are on the
Soliya Board of Directors. Both Jeremy and Adam were executives at Allaire
Software and Macromedia, and now work at the new start-up, Brightcove, that
will soon revolutionize the way video is distributed and viewed.

If you are interested in being involved in this ground-breaking project to
connect people across this heated divide, please contact Soliya President,
Lucas Welch at lucas-tJL7Gkjpsm+sTnJN9+BGXg@public.gmane.org and we can prov
ide you with a more detailed
overview of exactly what we'd like to do.

Thanks very much. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

- Lucas

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