John Tynan’s Fifteen Minute Break

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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Todd Mundt (Iowa Public Radio), Lee Banville (The Online NewsHour), Mike Bettison (MPR), Deborah May Hughes (PI), Melinda Whittstock (CNC), Andy Carvin (NPR), Raul Ramirez (KQED), Jake Shapiro (PRX)

This panel is bit above my pay grade. But it actually comes as a refreshing surprise from the folks at the executive level. And it all starts here with CPB Head Bruce Theriault: “we will only fund this project if there is collaboration across silos - and if its shared with stations.”

So. This is some of what they came up with:

* Election Map - NPR / NewsHour
* Ask Your Lawmaker - CNC
* You Decide - KQED
* Select a Candidate - MPR
* Knowledge Network - resources - discussion threads

Still to Come:
* BallotVox - PRX
* Get My Vote - NPR

Questions:
Dale Hobson asks for a way that these can be used for local issues and elections. Andy replies that this will be coming soon. So that, if you choose to ask people about a particular initiative on the ballot during a random local election, that stations will have tool to use… Long after the election.

Andy Carvin replies again to a different question with the answer that the “Social Media Best Practices Toolkit” doesn’t exist yet. But it will. And it will contain documentation and tutorials outlined by the designers and users themselves.

Lee Banville says that 600 stories on map on Super Tuesday - and 300 of them were from local stations. He said that local stations add a ton of credibility.

The CPB’s Bruce Theriault makes a comment in closing which goes something like this: We played. We worked together. Now, Stations Need to Play and promote the stuff. And Lastly, we need to get out of the walled garden of public media and allow the public and other institutions a chance to play.

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Science Friday’s Ira Flatow on Second Life

Location. Location. Location. The Science Friday Island situated near NASA and other scientific facilities.

Thinking that the Ira Flatley avatar looks like an Ira Flatow action figure. Could you imagine that - a collection of public broadcasting dolls for kids?

Second Life People are private people. They literally have to run after these people to get their comments on the air.

Second Life only has 40,000 inhabitants right now - as compared to their hundred of thousands of people who listen to the show via the broadcast.

Other initiatives:

The folks at Science Friday are thinking about how they want to best allocate resources to their various Science Friday assets. They’re also shooting video… And taking the time to edit them. They’re also working to create a Spanish speaking ScienceFriday site.

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The Brian Lehrer Show from WNYC

Jim Colgon - Now with BBC / PRI’s show the Takeaway. Used to be with the Brian Lehrer show. Experimented over his time at WNYC with Social Media.

They had great listeners - Experts! Wanted to tap into that.

Thought of a simple assignment… Ask people to count the number of cars on their block and report back on their comments page with how many of those cars where SUVs. Gave them a week to do this. Wound up with 4000 cars and mapped them on google maps. Wound up with the percentage and the total. Called it a “listener reported project” Invited an expert onto the show to talk about the results and about the use of SUVs for people in lower New York.

It got people looking around their surroundings in new ways. A way to get their listeners involved in an act of journalism, in an act of reporting. Because it was a listener reported activity, they looked at it with a different kind of attention - not just a bland report from a survey.

A great example of “crowdsourcing” - an act of journalism that one person, or one newsroom, could do.

This led to additional projects:

Asked people to find out if there was price disparity in stores. Picked a few standard items. One quart of non-organic whole milk. One head of iceberg lettuce. And a six pack of budweiser beer.

They compiled the totals. Generated a map for milk, for lettuce, then beer. They called the resulting show “Are You Being Gouged?”

This was reported about in the New York Times.

This increased peoples awareness. People were doing reporting. They felt like reporters.

The repurposed their existing tools. They used comments tool at wnyc.org, they used google maps.

They found that the simpler it was the more response they received. The level of complexity of the task was prohibitive.

These kinds of acts help to involve listeners in a way that they had never been before.

They had no idea what the results were going to be. They found, for example, that the price of milk is regulated by the state of new york, and they found a few listeners were going to challenge stores whose prices were above this level.

This only came about out of the willingness to experiment.

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Epic FU

Zadi Diaz - Co-founder of Epic FU discusses how she covers online culture.

Her show recognizes artists and people doings online who normally would not get recognition.

Epic FU poses question to audience, for instance, about woman who wanted to commit suicide in 90 days. Participants in show responded as part of a “campfire discussions”

Zadi uses Mix discussion boards - allows listeners to create their own groups - allows the producers of the show to find out what the audience are interested in.

She also has show on YouTube. Great to have discovery… Great to get video out, but at a point you want people to come back to you.

She advises us not to depend on one social networking sites. She uses Ning.com . She uses Upcoming. And she keeps up with everyone via Twitter.

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Blogging with KJZZ’s Locally Produced Here and Now

While work on the web site and think that I’m in a position to advise on what happens on the web at KJZZ. In this case, Paul Atkinson producer for KJZZs weekly hour of the locally produced segmet of Here and Now, took advantage of the tools and - on his own - did a great job conceiving of the idea for calling bloggers… As experts! They’re not just people with opinions writing on their private islands online, but they’re experts in their own right.

As a producers, Atkinson was surprised that they were as informed as they were. Additionally, Bloggers promoted their appearance on the show, so people were attracted to join in on the discussion who normally may not have listened or visited the site.

In an effort to recruit bloggers, Paul looked to calling people he knew and trusted in the field of politics. These trusted peple suggested a few sources. They also suggested that Paul join a listserv. Paul commented that he received so many responses that he had to turn people away. That he only had room for one democratic blogger, one republic and one independent.

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Questions

In the questions section. Ira says, you have to tell people you are there. That’s why Science Friday is offering videos for people to put their sites, to direct traffic back to sciencefriday.org and back to the show.

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Someone in the audience asks if Paul had difficulty getting bloggers to blog at KJZZ.org and not on their own blogs. This presents an interesting thought which I will post a follow up in just a minute.Similarly, Paul admits that, coming from a traditional broadcast background, to recruit bloggers he relied on contacting people he knew by phone or email, then getting referrals for the names of bloggers whom they trusted.To address both of these points, I pose a question to Andy Carvin with Paul present… I ask Andy what he thinks about news rooms using a Technorati keyword search to find out what bloggers are saying about a subject… As a way of enlisting trusted and active bloggers about a topic for a particular show. Andy replies that, “if you aren’t doing that, you are in the dark.” Andy poses too that just as technorati is an indispensable tool for finding out what people are saying online about a topic, this tool is also indispensable for finding out the impact OF THE TALK SHOW ITSELF online. Andy recommends that talk shows set up a “watchlist” in technorati or their show (or station), to find out what people are saying about the station NOW, across the entire web.

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Jack Brighton, Internet Director at WILL Public Media and member of the PBCore Resource Group presents how metadata information about a media file could potentially lead to the discovery and indexing of the vast public resources of public broadcasting archives.

Jack showed how authorial metadata like creative commons licensing or technical data like bitrate and length is contained within a “PBCore Record”

Jack displays a podcast feed on the screen and compares this to a pbcore feed. they look fairly similar.

He then shows what our current system for cataloging metadata about our digital archives: a cluttered desk, which he describes as TOGN or “The Old Guy Knows.”

Talks about how useful and sexy librarians are and how they could be elisted in cataloging public broadcasting archives, because that’s what they live for, and because they love public broadcasting.

He shows how he built pbcore into their station’s public web site (Jack has build WILL’s web archives using the CMS Expression Engine - but the discussion later on shows that any cms, just as it publishes currently publishes RSS - can publish PBCore, provided the metadata associated with the media resources is associated with the object in the database. So know that PBCore is not necessarily tied to any one database or CMS)

Access to WILL’s archives via PBCore is available online right now on their public site. Jack invites us to check out WILL’s Series on “Edible Books” and points out how making this data available in PBCore could allow for another program or service such as PBS’s Frontline could actually “ingest” pbcore into their database and make WILL’s information known to producers as they are researching stories, or could be displayed to users on their web site - and these are just two sample uses.

Jack posits that, if there was a wider practice of adopting and cataloging public media assets using PBcore, this could enable listeners, producers and researchers to search across the entire library of media resources across all of public broadcasting. Think about the amount of quality resources that this would make available. Think about the cost and time savings of not having to go out and shoot a segment of video because one of your colleagues either in the cubicle over or on another coast has taken the time to let you know about their work in a way that would actually allow you to find it.

Jack Brighton asks content creaters to think like archivists. He impresses this with humor by showing what he calls a bumper sticker for radical librarians - and implores us all to “Catalog Now!”

Jack points out that people outside of public broadcasting are excited about PBCore and are using it. The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is developing educational materials and AV preservation using PBCore.

Jack points out a few action items. In particular, he contends that we need a Central Authority to manage updates and changes to the PBCore specification. The second action item was the recommendation for people to let the CPB know that PBCore is important to them, to us as a system.

He points out that there is a free database at PBCore.org which you can download and use. He points out that there’s a Schema which he describes as a “recipie” for using pbcore.

Jack points out that New Skills are Needed. We need to catalog the media that we collect and we need to catalog this using metadata standards.

One of the session attendees from KQED asks if we should be using PBCore instead of RSS. He describes it playfully but pointedly as “one feed to rule them all.” Jack replies by describing a “metadata engine” which can take the information out of a database and express it in many different formats.

Jeremy Roberts asks if there is a near term carrot to get people adopt and make their archives available using pbcore.

Dale Hobson asked about whether there is a parser to to display a remote PBCore feed. Dale describes this parser as similar to PHP’s Magpie - but instead of spitting out html from an RSS feed, it would display html from a PBCore feed. I agree that this practical application could yield tangible benefits, could raise the profile of the format and hasten adoption of adopting the standard. Jack also agrees that this would be a good next step.

There was more talk and some learned and passionate comments from the audience, most notably from Nan Rubin from WNET/Thirteen in New York.

I’ll fill out this post with links to who you can contact if you are interested in using pbcore.

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It must be raining on Andrew Shalat. He had a lot of issues from dropping a sausage on his slacks to a stuttering internet connection. But in the end, the point came through forcefully.

There is no interference of technology between capturing and editing. So what does that leave us? What’s between… Story!

I think he might be preaching to the Choir here in talking about story. About how there are two kinds of video:

Narrative: the three part story
Single idea: reportage

He talks about how he’s the soft sell session for the day. He says his book How to Do Everything with Online Video is more for beginners getting started with video. I wonder if he’s pitching his story more for the radio folk who are tentative about picking up a video camera and thinking of applying their storytelling skills from Radio to Videography. But why he would be saying this to a group of Television professionals is beyond me.

His synopsis of how to tell a story very similar to Ira Glass’ advice on telling a radio story.

He asks us to step away from the technology and to serve the story.

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