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.

Today, in subscribing to the Podcast for PyCon 2008, I noticed this entry:

“It almost seems like a joke: a family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, KS (population 80,000) releases an open-source web framework. It’s not a joke, of course: today Django is an increasingly popular web development platform. As an open-source community Django has been incredibly successful; in Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON keynote, he called Django “the new face of open source.” But it’s often unclear how we got here. How did a couple of programmers at a newspaper convince management to contribute to the open-source ecosystem? How does the company justify the time its developers spend on open source? And how have we as individuals and as a business had to adapt to become better open source developers?”

I was then like, “Huh! A family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas? That sounds familiar?!! Could it be? Yep, it is… Rob Curley the 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speaker who “blew the roof off the Parc 55 with a dynamic presentation, illustrating his strategy of “hyper-localism.” Curley is one of the most decorated newspaper web directors in the United States. Some called it the best keynote speech–ever…” You can read more about his keynote speech here.

I remember coming away from the conference saying “I want to do what he does!” What an exciting, energizing person, who’s making a difference in his community and in the media industry. And now to find out that he’s doing it using open source technologies, and releasing a cool new web application framework based on python to boot! I find myself saying again… “I want to do what he does!”

I know there was some talk at last year’s conference about using Pubforge.org to support open source projects both within public broadcasting as well as independent media producers from beyond broadcast.net. I know too that, in addition to Pubforge.org , there’s always the Public Broadcasting Open Source Best Practices google group. There’s also the successful open source project from WNYC and KCRW, the East West Audio server. And there’s been collaborations that have not necessarily been open-source, like the momentum around the IMA’s with the Public Media Metrics project. But I wonder if the public broadcasting community could better support open source projects?

Tell me, what do you think it will take to foster a vibrant open-source community within public broadcasting? Tell me, what do you think it would take to have some real momentum around open-source software projects?

For those of you who came away from Rob Curley’s 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speech and felt, like I did, that “I want to do what he’s doing!” And for those of you who would like to do this, like Rob, using a collaborative, open source approach, tell me, is 2008 the year for us to get organized? Is this year’s Public Media conference the place for us to start?

Just finished defining a process for recording, editing, and posting to the web video recorded during KJZZ’s weekly live radio call-in show, Here and Now. All on a budget of next to nothing.This was done using two consumer grade digital cameras, two tripods, Adobe Premier elements, a cd of the show recorded off the air, and some finishing touches using Windows Movie maker. It was inspired by Talk of the Nation’s interview with Michael More.

To do this, we used two digital still cameras, a Canon PowerShot A540 and a Canon PowerShot A640. These cameras are not video cameras, so they save video as mjpeg avi files (just a bunch of .jpg photos all grouped together) and not real video files. This is important to note, in that the files should be converted to a true avi with some kind of video compression (I used Indeo compression). I used a program called MPEG Streamclip to do the conversion. Converting the file seemed to require less demand of the CPU during the editing process.

The beauty of simply using two tripods: one trained on the host, the other on the guest, means that all you have to do is start the camera before the show and let it roll. The other benefit is that these cameras are really small and that they seem less intrusive than full blown television cameras, so people seem more authentic, like they’re not performing for an audience.

The other detail is that the audio that the cameras captured were quickly thrown away. The audio that you hear in the finished video came directly from a recording of what went out on the air. It was a little bit of a bear to sync up the audio. When previewing the video on a television screen, the voices looked a bit out of sync, but when the same files were exported to YouTube, the voices seemed very much in sync.

The video segments were put together using Adobe Premier Elements. (I couldn’t use Windows Movie Maker because I needed to work with two video clips on a timeline). As I previewed the video, to switch between the guest and the host, I spliced the guest’s video and turned the opacity to 0. This allowed the video of the host to be viewed. I don’t know if this is the right way to go about it. But this was my first afternoon working with Adobe Premier.

I exported the edited video, then brought it into Windows Movie Maker to add the credits and the music. I’m sure this isn’t the most refined way to go about it, but perhaps you might find this useful or encouraging. One other thing that you might find interesting is that, to find Creative Commons licensed music to use, I went to jamendo.com to grab the first instrumental track with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that struck my fancy.

Throughout this process, I found that there was no shortage of opinions. Everyone I talked to had an strong views on how to do this. And everyone’s opinion was different. I’m not sure what to say about that, but I hope you found something in my description of this process enlightening.

I just finished implementing the xspf flash player on KJZZ.org!

In looking at the developer’s forum, I found that cetra3 created a version which includes a Seek Button and play bar, which allows people to view where they are in an audio file as it is playing - as well as allows people to select where in an audio file they would like to listen.

I am not sure how close this is to WNYC’s audio player. I had an issue with their player not recognizing the xspf playlists as they were dynamically generated for each story (some weird 404 error in the header — likely more an issue on my end than theirs).

I’ve also put together some handy javascript to allow people to copy the code and embed this on their blog or myspace page. I’m also using the xspf file to serve random audio promos and images for the public radio talent quest.

Thought you might find this interesting.

For example, here’s an audio story from KJZZ’s recent Chandler Roundup Series.

In addition to KQED’s Quest Explorations is there anyone else out there Geotagging their stories within public broadcasting? More importantly, is there any kind of a national initiative to get stations / webcasters to start doing this?

I’ve have testing the ability to map KJZZ’s news stories here:

http://kjzz.org/news/map

http://kjzz.org/map

using, for example, the following rss feed:

http://kjzz.org/search/georss?keyword=immigration&size=5

http://kjzz.org/search/rss?keyword=immigration&size=5

I’ve also started testing this with Yahoo Pipes.

It would be interesting to see what a world map would look like if NPR was geotagging their stories, or what a national map would look like if we aggregated stories from public broadcasting stations across the country.

Are there other stations doing this, or considering doing this, with their stories? If so, should there a dialog between stations about aggregating stories and about the possibilties and best practices for mapping stories?

Is there some kind of national initiative for at stations across the system to start serving their content in this way. Is there support for Andy Carvin’s Election 2.0 Task Force where he says:

we must promote open standards for aggregating content - consistent tagging protocols at the station level, heavy use of RSS to pull content together, distributed content modules that can exist simultaneously on local and national websites, etc - to allow all us to mix and mashup these resources so they can surface at the local and national level.

What are your thoughts and experiences?