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Rob Curley – 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speaker – Releases Popular Open Source Platform

November 28, 2007 in publicbroadcasting | View Comments

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?

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Is iCal the Next RSS?

March 4, 2007 in publicbroadcasting | View Comments

In light of the proposition at IMA2007, that public broadcasting adopt a common program schedule format, I’m dusting off an email that I sent along to the now defunct NPR Pilots group in March of ‘05 which people might find interesting…

I found out recently that Google’s calendar supports the iCal format (as does Apple’s iCal program, and Mozilla’s Sunbird). (Upcoming.org also supports an iCal export). So it would be possible that a station’s schedule could be edited in sunbird, saved to a DAV server and displayed on a station web site, or subscribed to within the google calendar, and distributed via google to people’s web pages as a widget. KQED has already done this here.

As a case in point, if this schedule:

http://kjzz.org/programs/schedule.ics

were actively updated, listeners (using Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal program or Mozilla’s Sunbird) could have up to the minute information about the KJZZ program schedule and copy information about any program into their personal calendar.

Additionally, this means that national organizations, such as NPR, if they were to subscribe to each individual stations’ feeds, could develop (or adapt) a parser to bring these ical files into their database, and thus actually display individual station’s schedule information at NPR.org. Other organizations and businesses who could benefit from this are publicradiofan.com , radiotime.com, and the individual program producers who could show which stations are airing their program, and when.

While this is not as ideal or complete as stations exchanging schedule information in xml, it is perhaps a first step in the right direction, and perhaps more useful to listeners in the end. As a matter of fact, this doesn’t have to be some prohibitive, technical rocket science… given the proper username and password, a designated staff member, can even edit their station’s schedule at their desktop (or at home) within Sunbird, and publish this to the station web site (or to any web server which supports the WebDAV protocol) – or they could use a hosted service like the iCal Exchange.

For those of you interested in displaying ical from within a plone site, Nate Aune (from plone4artists) has done some interesting work with iCal here :
http://plone4artists.org/products/plone4artistscalendar


A cursory search yielded a

PHP ical parser here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpicalendar/

A parser for .Net:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/icalparser/

For Python:
http://codespeak.net/icalendar/

For Perl:
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/08/18/ical_dot.html

Ruby too!:
http://icalendar.rubyforge.org/

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Open Source Slideshow Software

March 3, 2007 in publicbroadcasting | View Comments

If you want to pitch open source sofware to your management, go directly for the heart: show them this open source equivalent to Powerpoint!

As a case in point, I used this software to create the following slideshow:

Open Source Slideshow – IMA2007 Project Planning Session

based on my conference notes from the informative Project Planning tech session.

The elevator pitch:

  • opensource, standards based. Only requires a browser. No costly, proprietary software necessary.
  • Authored using only intutively formatted text files!
  • A fast, easy way to go from conference notes… to getting the word out!

The presentation above was created using the following text file.

For additional information, see: Easy Slideshows using reST and S5

Note: I discovered this tool as a result of checking out Jacob Smullyan’s (from WNYC.org) del.icio.us bookmarks – another case for using existing tools for collaborating as a network.

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Getting Beyond the Tension and on to the Work

February 26, 2007 in publicbroadcasting | View Comments

I was worried when I left the beyondbroadcast sessions at the end of the IMA2007 conference that people were going to get bogged down in sematics and politics. Brendan Greeley was advocating for opensourcebroadcasting to be used as the del.icio.us tag as well as for the accompanying domain. It made sense to me; so clear, identifyable, and something I could see people easily rallying around. But I had to get started on the adventure of taking public transportation to the airport, so I trusted them with the discussion.

401608877_68cd1b5104.jpg

Photos from the pubforge working group (Photo Credit: Doc Searls)

As I left the room, I was worried that the whole thing was going to get torpedoed by inside politics, with the IMA (despite their putting on their best conference yet!) only giving lip service to the discussion about opensource.

Especially since earlier today, I had found one of my posts was deleted from the conference wiki. Who knows why it was removed, I should temper my thoughts about people being threatened by where the discussion might have lead and consider that perhaps the conference wiki was meant to be more informational and less about discussion. And that’s fine. Either way, I recovered the post by looking at the history for the file and placed it here.

And it looks like my trust was well placed and my suspicions ill-founded. Who knows how the discussion went but I’m glad to see that they were able to find consensus around using pubforge as a del.icio.us tag for this discussion as well as for the accompanying domain… and then went on to define some great things on the beyondbroadcast wiki here (kudos to Bill Swersey, Bill Hanel and the entire group – what they’ve come up with shows some real bravado, not lip service in the least!).

It’s encouraging to see that in one session they were able to clearly define such a project. I’m confident if these near strangers can do this in two hours, that come next year’s conference we’ll have several success stories to present.

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A Challenge

February 23, 2007 in publicbroadcasting | View Comments

Remember browsing the web with a 28.8 modem? We sure do after attempting to board the elevators at the Mariott at Copley Plaza.

The elevators in this hotel are abysmal. I issued the following challenge on the IMA Blog :

I’d like to issue a challenge. Let me know if this sounds fun! Let’s see how many creatively staged photos we can take of people waiting for the elevators at the hotel: GM’s propped up under the up and down controls sleeping… marketing groups commandeering housekeeping implements to pry the elevator doors apart. Whole mobs of attendee’s with fists raised! Whole Chess Games played between the fourth floor and the desired floor. You get the idea…

Brendan Greeley and Andy Carvin hosted an great session for getting radio folks up to speed on using technorati and bloglines for listening to what other people are saying about you (or me, John Tynan) or about a particular topic. This allows you to have a conversation across many disparate publishing platforms and sites. Now, how to employ this toward better telling stories and/or following up on the stories we tell. Now there’s a challenge!

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