John Tynan’s Fifteen Minute Break

This year at IMA2008, I plan to blog the conference. In doing this, I’ve set up my camera with an EyeFi card so that any photos I take will be automatically uploaded to my flickr account… without first uploading them to the computer (Too bad they can’t be tagged at the same time). I’m also using my trusty Palm T/X to update my blog. I’ve even set up wordpress so that any new posts also send a notification to twitter with the tag: IMA08. Blog posts will automatically get filed in the publicbroadcasting category (too bad they can’t be automatically tagged as well, but I can do that later). Additionally, I’ll also be sending twitter updates from the TX alone. I’ve packed some backup batteries and I think I’m all set to go.

I’m reading over the birds of a feather dinner schedule, checking out who I’m looking forward to lifting a glass with, and which conversations I’d most like to participate in. I’m checking out the conference schedule and getting familiar with the presenters. Looking forward to seeing and hearing some great things! Looking forward to getting inspired!

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?

I am intrigured by Andy Carvin’s suggestion of forming an Election 2.0 Task Force where:

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.

Additionally, Craig Rosa’s comment about microformats had me thinking… how does the taxononomy/lexicon for describing objects using microformats inform how we might structure a database of web resources? While I know PBCore is noble and vast and everything, it’s primary goal is to be used for digital asset management - not for web sites (please let me know if I am wrong in my thinking about this). Are there content management systems out there which use microformats as a naming standard for metadata right out of the box? And how would this help facilitate a consistent “tagging protocol?” Also, in looking for how we might do this, I wonder if RSS is only the tip of the iceberg. Does this also mean a standard API for searching (and retrieving) RSS… if so, does this imply a standard REST protocol for querying a station web site and getting information back? I did a quick search for “common api standard REST” and came up with this modest proposal: Atom Will Change the World which contains a sprinkling of all the best buzzwords: Atom, GeoRSS, Dublin Core, etc. etc. But what it also says is that Atom is not only a syndication format, it’s also a publishing protocol:

In case you are not familiar with Atom, the syndication format provides a standard format for saving blog content in XML and the publishing protocol provides a standard API for clients to read, create or update Atom documents stored on servers.

This article goes on to say:

By combining a simple data model, a standard data exchange format, easy extensibility and a common API and simple specifications, Atom offers a great foundation for building web services.

and that Atom

provides a foundation on which anyone can build. Its much easier to build a Web service by adding some custom content to an Atom feed than it is to create a new XML exchange format and API from scratch. Thus, I believe Atom will become the de facto way of building web services. The first place to look is to Web 2.0 sites. Many currently expose their data via proprietary web service APIs - I’ll wager over the coming year most will move to Atom.

Shoot! Should I, as a webmaster at a public radio station, be implementing Atom feeds and moving towards an ideal of a standard API? And is the API already out there? Should I be learning about the Atom publishing protocol?

I want to thank Kevin Gamble in his post about Public media and copyright for holding our feet to the fire on this issue. I actually posed a question about this in one of the sessions at IMA2007 (or maybe it was over dinner)… in particular, we post all our audio using a creative commons license.

My question was this, how do we make it easy for people to talk about our work, to cite it, to “copy it” to display it. Is it through an embedded flash player that we can make it easy to include the appropriate attribution information, the station’s call letters/url, the author’s name, the link back to the story. If there is a standard practice out there, please let me know about it.

For instance, I got an email from The Herberger College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University, they wanted to use an interview that we did with one of their professors, Jazz Studies director Mike Kocour. I babbled on in technicaleese about attribution etc and they simply said, “just give us the audio.” For all the slickness and polish of ASU’s site, when they finally post the audio that they said they just wanted, what will the presentation be like? Will this be accurately and equitably presented?

How do we as public broadcasters have this conversation? If we start with how to protect the rights of our own content, then maybe it will be easier for us to think about extending similar protections to user generated content.