PubForge Blog

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.