John Tynan’s Fifteen Minute Break

I just finished listening to the first half of an amazing interview by Steve Gillmour with Dennis Haarsager and the NPR’s Digital Media Team at gillmorgang.techcrunch.com.

I’ve only listened to the first half of the interview, but I was so blown away by the clarity of thought and forward thinking that I heard that I had to transcribe it as best I could, to be sure I got this into my head just right. Here are some selected highlights:

Haarsager: (Loosely quoted) I’m disciple of Clayton Christensen and believe the disruptive innovation is unavoidable. That we need to figure out ways to disrupt ourselves and move forward in innovative ways. The step we’re in right now is realizing that for our company (NPR) and our 280 licensees/members which represent about 800 stations, that the individual portal strategy that we’ve been following ever since the web was invented is not enough. We definitely need those portals but we need to be able to put our content in places that people aren’t expecting it; whether that be through widgets or the open api, or through mobile and other kinds of distribution opportunities. We basically need to be everywhere, rather than expecting people to come to us… that’s not the way a lot of people use the web. And we need to harness the power of search in that regard in a much more powerful way. I’ve been calling it kind of easter egg strategy where we “hide” content in plain sight all over the web and ask people to go out and gather it up.

Gillmor: Hide? Is that something you are about to do or is this something that you are doing?

Haarsager: (Loosely quoted) The Open API is a very important first step. But we’re also looking at creating what we’ve been talking about as “a second prong of digital” something that’s independent in many ways from npr.org but enables stations to collect content on their own and form partnerships with other non-profits in their communities, becoming more important to them, and curating bundles of content that they can place with these partners and also producing content for these partners. The more places that we can deposit the stuff that we do the better chance that somebody will find it either because they visited that site or page rank has been enhanced because we have all this cross-linking out there. We’re actively trying to get that started. This will be consistent with some of the things that I’ve been working on in the past. Trying to make distribution work, but this time starting from an economic perspective rather than from a technology perspective.

…

Haarsager: It’s kind of geared toward moving from the scarcity world of broadcasting to the abundance world of the web. You know, like any good beaurocracy, us in public broadcasting tend to make a virtue out of a necessity sometimes, and so the notion of having to curate at a very high level all content in a way that is consistent with a broadcast message means that there is very few opportunity for us to, say, help the local nature conservancy group with its particular messaging. But that isn’t to say that this isn’t consistent with our mission. So, if we have the ability through our technology and through our ability to drive traffic to the web to help that group share its message with others in the community and to bring in great ideas from a nature conservancy organization across the country to their own constituents locally. That seems to me a real win, all to the good. And if we can bring to their web site not only that, but npr stories that are consistent with their mission, that’s also really good. So the idea then is to create these little opportunities for service that really aren’t possible in the broadcast environment, but are consistent with what we’re doing. And if you can make yourself more valuable in the community, then often revenue follows from that, from grant opportunities and tax based sources and sometimes from contributors. What we’re trying to do ultimately is to help diversify the economy of public radio in a way that helps us all.

…

It’s more sophisticated than the Public service publisher portal model in terms of its distribution mode. There we were looking at a portal and a portal that would be expressed in a distributed way over public station web sites, but those are also portals. So here we’re trying to break beyond the bounds of the portal to give us distribution very deeply into a community. So a given station might have a hundred partners locally, ultimately if it was able to put that together, and have content there. And some of that content would also express itself across the country because what they’re doing locally is of importance to somebody in N.C. when their base night be in N.D.. And all that is done in a little bit more planful way than we were looking for on the psp initiative which was to enable stations to make pay per use or subscription plays or simply to distribute the stuff for free, but mostly within the traditional bounds of their local web site. I just think that that’s a dated view of where we ought to be exclusively, and we need to recognize that other non-profits are just as interested in using the web to distribute their content as we are and the barriers to entry are relatively low, so why not do this community level aggregation in order to help everybody.

Amazing! I am seeing the start of a major media network attempting to re-invent itself, in accordance with its mission, on the web. And I’m hopeful that if we approach this vision, we’ll be doing as much good on the web as we’ve been doing on the air for years.

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Bill Haenel, Dale Hobson and Jack Brighton at Public Media 2008 (Photo Credit: John Tynan)

I’ve worked as a webmaster in public broadcasting for almost a decade. And over the last several years, I’ve seen a slow, pragmatic shift towards increased collaboration in online ventures between local public broadcasting stations and national organizations and producers as evidenced (in NPR’s Podcasting initiative, their relaunch of NPR Music and) in the ongoing Election Collaboration. At the recent Public Media Conference in Los Angeles, Bruce Theriault recalled how he motivated national organizations to collaborate around the 2008 Election by saying, “we will only fund this project if there is collaboration across silos - and if its shared with stations.”

And, while this initiative has exercised great strides towards increased cooperation across numerous organizations, it is my opinion that we still have yet to come into our own as a network. As Bruce Theriault says again “we need to get out of the walled garden of public media and allow the public and other institutions a chance to play.” To a greater or lesser degree, these initiatives are still fairly centrally controlled and (aside from the NPR podcasting initiative) have yet to truly leverage the unique characteristic of public broadcasting as a distributed, network in general, and more specifically the potential of an open source model of collaboration.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we leveraged the combined efforts of the fifty or so interested and capable web professionals all working at public broadcasting stations (not to mention the larger community of programmers and the general public, many of whom happen to love public media… a lot) who would welcome the opportunity to work together towards a number of shared solutions (many of which would have clear benefits to our audience directly).

With that in mind, two weeks ago, I sent out an email to a half-dozen of my colleagues citing my reasons for why it would be useful to begin collaborating around open standards, common practices, and a common software and scripting platform distributed through an open source license. My email went something like this. I proposed that we form:

1) A co-op for public broadcasters to share code - and costs - where we agree on a similar solar system of scripting resources and practices - where we leverage upon an existing codebase and (ideally) share our efforts among stations and among the open source community as well. When needed, we can collectively raise money to pay outside developers to tailor code to our needs and - where we are literally invested in the success of this venture and of each others sites.

2) Rather than relying on our own expertise alone to steer this ship, I propose we talk with a hosting provider or a organization like NPower or NTen or grassroots.org (which specializes in supporting non-profits with their technology needs) about providing hosting and (some of) the ongoing support. This way, we could focus on initiatives which we could band together and leverage shared code and programming costs and not have to be reliant on each other for the maintenance of the system.

Anyone who has gotten to know me over the years knows that this is my baileywick (As evidenced from This post from last year’s conference. However it turns out now this idea is not just important to me… or to a few of my friends… just recently…

The Knight Foundation awarded a $327,000.00 grant to Quiddities to develop an open source website and content management tool for KUSP as a model for public radio stations nationwide.

I’m sure the bright folks at the Knight Foundation and KUSP had given this idea a great deal of thought… and I know there are a ton of other excellent ideas percolating within public broadcasting right now as well… but I can’t help feeling like the guy who happened to step in front of the right parade at the right time. What I’m trying to say is this, I can’t take any credit for this grant, but I can say that I’ve seen it coming, and I could not be more delighted for us all!

With that in mind, as a first step in enlisting input from other stations on this project, Steve Laufer from KUSP got on the phone with Bill Haenel from the Integrated Media Association, Dale Hobson from North Country Public Radio, Jack Brighton from WILL, John Tynan (me) from KJZZ, and Matthew Tift from Wisconsin Public Radio to begin to discuss how we might work together on such a project and what first steps we would begin to take.

Some of the tasks that came out of today’s call were to:

• Set up a wiki to generate and focus some specific questions about what people would want to see in an open source CMS for their radio or television station.
• Create a survey to identify and prioritize features of the proposed CMS.
• Identify the skills and interests of people wanting to be involved in this project.
• Identify what existing project people would be willing to contribute to this endeavor.
• Identify how this could promote participation (and interoperability) between stations and national producers and our audience.

Please know that these initial impressions of the project are more personal than they are official. Aside from our conference call, I had only talked with Steve Laufer a few times between sessions at Public Media 2008. I have not been privy to the discussions between KUSP, Quiddities and the Knight Foundation. However, I know I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I am sure that there is more than a handful of people (like me) to whom the principal parties can turn to for assistance and who will be be happy to devote their energies to the project’s success.

Cross posted at pubforge.org.

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