PubForge Blog

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.