PubForge Blog

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 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 on my personal site at johntynan.com.

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?

Tags: opensourcebroadcasting, publicbroadcasting

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.

For example, have a look at any news report at kjzz.org .

Perhaps this might be useful for other stations as well. If you have any questions about how this was done, please feel free to ask.
Tags: Pubforge, Opensourcebroadcasting, beyondbroadcast

After checking out an article about Google Maps that Todd Mundt pointed out, I decided to put this to the test and came up with some questions that others might find interesting.

First, Go to this article on the Google Maps API Blog:
KML and GeoRSS Support Added to the Google Maps API

then enter the following url (or an equivalent url) in the field just above the map, and to the right of the button marked “add”:

http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?feedUrl=http://kjzz.org/search/rss?keyword=smoking&size=3

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

or go here:

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

or here:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://kjzz.org/search/rss?keyword=immigration

Think conceptually, how this might be applicable for visualizing the range of stories covered by a local news station, by NPR, and by public broadcasting as a whole?

Think practically, should reporters be required to get latitude and longitude data for each story? When they enter a city & state for the “dateline” field, should this field be more precise? What if the relevant places for a story take place in multiple locations?

Should stations start embedding GeoRSS data in thier rss feeds?

Is anyone doing this now? What about KQED’s Quest application? How did the building of this application necessitate that they think differently about the metadata for stories, for the architecture of their site?

In answer to this question, Tim Olson and Craig Rosa from KQED chimed in here:

http://johntynan.com/archives/26#postcomment
Tags: opensourcebroadcasting, pubforge, beyondbroadcast, GeoRSS, GoogleMaps

Just got off the phone with Seth Gotlieb (formerly of optaros.com, now at contenthere.net ) he had presented at IMA2007 as part of the discussion on choosing a cms.

Seth had some great advice that helped me form my thinking about how I should proceed as a technologist as well as how the folks rallying together at pubforge.org might best proceed as a group.

As someone who has built a good part of a station site using a particular brand of open source technologies (let’s say, I’ve chosen to drive our station around in the open source equivalent of a Ford), I will be facing a decision, given that there seems to be some considerable intertia in the Chevy camp. But now may not be the time to jump from one moving car to another, at least not yet.

Seth suggested that some good first steps would be for us to:

• Identify group of stations (or individuals) who are willing to work together around a specific (technology) or goal.
• Arrange for a week-long training session for the group in a single physical location. Either decide which city you would like to hold this as a group, or decide the city based on where the training is being held. (For plone users, he suggested contacting Joel Burton about a Plone Bootcamp — for drupal users, he suggested talking with Jeff Robbins at lullabot.com).

He went on to say that the benefit of getting together in the same place would:

• be an indicator of commitment - those who would be willing to travel would be more invested
• Getting out of the office would allow us to focus better
• It would be an opportunity to forge bonds socially and increase networking opportunities

He suggested we identify which projects are currently in development (such as the drupal stations modules project, or find/start a broadcasting equivalent to the ploneforartists project). He suggested we identify which aspects of these projects we would like to see improved or added upon. He suggested that we could add an economy of scale by either collaborating on code as a group, or by pooling our cash to pay for additions to the codebase.

He suggested that we check into the pricepoints for training. If we have x number of participants, what will it cost us?

He suggested, in looking for people who would be willing to attend the training, that we should start with the folks who initially put the module together, for instance the drupal station modules were originally designed for KPSU, a college radio station in Portland, Oregon. Maybe this station would be a good place to start with a partnership, and then look outward from there.

I guess that leads to the question, is there a listing of folks from the latest IMA conference who were interested in using Drupal, Plone or alfresco (or perhaps frameworks such as jboss or ruby, or django — or even closed source cms’ like Jack Brighton’s work with expression engine) the list goes on? Do you think such a list should be put together at pubforge.org?

To get a better idea how these discussions might be beneficial to Seth in his work, I asked “what was in it for him?” He replied that he wanted to keep tabs on the progress of these initiatives, that he would be interested in helping us form an organization, for helping us decide how such an entity would be structured, and how we are going to go about making decisions. His emphasis is in identifying the requirements for a product, in product selection, in enabling developers to work together and enabling companies work together using collaborative techniques / open source tools. Perhaps we’ll draw on his expertise again further down the road?

Tags: beyondbroadcast, ima2007, opensourcebroadcasting, pubforge

P.S. I did not realize that the blog at pubforge.org was setup, so I had posted this at the old site at webresources.org. Here are some comments on this post that we’ll want to move over here as well:

Jeff Robbins Says:

I heard my name mentioned and I figured I’d say “hello!” Yes, if you’ve got any questions or need help, we’d be happy to point you in the right direction and/or help you out directly. I’ve got a lot of interest in audio and broadcasting and we use many of the modules that Andrew Morton has written for KPSU on Lullabot.com.

Tim Olson Says:
Perhaps there is an upcoming developer conference/training that is focused on one of those (Ruby on Rails, Plone..) that we could tie this to?

We’re in the process of reconstituting the blog so it includes a broad group of public media practictioners. As a way of getting things started, Keith Hopper put together some language summarizing potential goes for the blog.

Hi everyone, Keith Hopper here (ok, how do we turn on bylines?). I’m a stickler for objectives. A group blog felt like a great idea, but I wanted to better understand what we might hope to accomplish. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far. Please suggest additions.

• Encourage public broadcasters to experiment and implement participatory media ideas learned from examples shared within the industry. Sharing examples will also help fledgling public media experiments by driving traffic to concepts that need attention, advice, and corrective action
• Stimulate original thinking by sharing trends and examples from outside the public broadcasting industry that may be relevant
• Provide a spotlight for individuals to introduce new, innovative ideas and get a dialog going about what public media might look like moving forward
• Help build a language and community around forward-thinking public media – make important connections across organizations to stimulate real work
• Demonstrate that public media professionals can be ahead of the curve – let’s lead the thinking not react to it
• … and other goals that I’m sure we can all figure out

-Keith Hopper

Feedback is most welcome.

Pubforge.org is a resource being built by a group of folks from public broadcasting organizations interested in applying open-source solutions to common problems faced in the transition from traditional to new media.  A work group met at the recent Beyond Broadcast meeting in Boston and chose this domain to be the home for discussion about these commom problems, for shared wisdom on best practices, for shared code and recommendations, and to be a repository for useful open source tools and applications.

In order to begin the work, Bill Haenel has installed this WordPress blog into the site. This is intended to be the focus for discussion. He also installed a mediawiki into the site at http://pubforge.org/pubwiki. This will be the nucleus for articles on problems, solutions, case studies, best practices, applications and projects.

We invite everyone interested in forming and exploiting a partnership between public broadcasting and the open source development community to register for this site and to contribute via the blog and the wiki.

As a means of starting the conversation here, I would like to ask people to consider the following question: What would I like to do in new media that i can’t do now with the resources capablities and knowledge now in hand?

Here are a few from my list:

• I would like to be able to integrate content from MySpace pages created by members of my station into my station.org site
• I would like a tool that makes it easy to create Google Map mashups for our news pages
• I would like to be able to grab specific items out of mutiple RSS feeds to create custom topical and regional feeds
• I want information on standards and best practices for creating video podcasts

Please post your own wish lists, then we can start identifying ones which have existing solutions, and which ones might be targets for development assistance.