Suggested Next Steps from IMA Presenter
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?