From April 1st till 4th the Iraqi poetry carnival Merbed will take place in Basrah, in the south of Iraq. This major cultural event is organized by the Writers Association of Iraq with support of the Ministry of Culture. Merbed is a meeting point for artists in Iraq and in the Diaspora. Some 400 poets, writers and other artists and intellectuals are expected to join this second edition of Merbed after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Streamtime will take part to produce a daily radio program in the form of streaming on the Internet. This will enable a global audience to experience the cultural revival of Iraq. The stream will be available for reproduction by local and international radio stations. The main language will be Iraqi Arabic, with short reports and round ups in English.

Streamtime is a loose international network of media activists dedicated to assist local media to get connected and make use of new media. Streamtime uses old and new media for the production of content and networks in the fields of media, arts, culture and activism in crisis areas, like Iraq. Last summer we realized streaming programs from Halabja and Baghdad. Since then several cultural programs were made in Holland with Iraqi artists and a special on Election Day.

The streamtime team are: Iraqi artist and radio maker Salam Khedher, a technician from the Iraqi Linux Users Group in Baghdad  http://www.iraqilinux.org/ and Dutch coordinator Jo van der Spek. They will be in Basrah from the 26th of March. The support team is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Further information:

Live streams are scheduled from April 2nd from 5 – 7 pm local time
(3 – 5 Western European Time, 9 – 11 AM New York Time)
The stream will be in mp3 format.
All programs are archived on  http://streamtime.org/
Dyne:bolic free and open source streaming software  http://www.dyne.org/
Financed by HIVOS,  http://www.hivos.nl/
Supported by  http://www.aidainternational.nl/

Contact: irakdeskxminy.nl