Drupal Media Projects, Tasks and Initiatives
The following are ongoing and/or proposed projects pertaining to Drupal media. Many of these have shared needs for features, documentation, and qualified talent to do the much needed work.
Drupal products, distributions, and installation profiles
Open Media Project
The primary goal of this Knight sponsored project is to leverage Drupal to give local communities more control over their public access channel. The system will build on several existing modules and maintain the suite of new modules through Drupal's CVS.
Radio Engage
The primary goal of this Knight sponsored project is to create a turnkey web site for radio news organizations. This content management and publishing system will address the needs of radio news sites, such as creating and archiving audio and text, producing podcasts and playlists and streaming live audio and video. KUSP, a public radio station on California’s Central Coast, will test the project.
VozMob: Mobile Voices
This MacArthur sponsored project offers an open-source multi-media platform optimized for low-cost mobile phones that lets users create, share, and reflect on stories about their lives and communities. An academic-community partnership, the project brings together immigrant day laborers, scholars, software developers, and community organizers for participatory design, curriculum development, evaluation and research around this emerging media tool and its social impact.
Local Publishing Platform and Regional Aggregation Hub
This Knight sponsored project will create two complementary sites: a Local Publishing Platform paired with a Regional Aggregation Hub. The Publishing Platform will support a range of activities, from a K12 school magazine, a community paper, a writing project (something like the National Writing Project or Youth Radio), a college paper, etc. The Aggregation Hub will provide a way for these different organizations to work together without losing any editorial control, or diluting the mission of the participating organizations.
Open Publish
OpenPublish is a packaged distribution of the popular open source social publishing platform, Drupal, that has been tailored to the needs of today's online publishers. OpenPublish is ideal for the implementation of a variety of media outlets sites including magazines, newspapers, journals, trade publications, broadcast, wire service and membership publications.
Managing News
Managing News is a robust news and data aggregator with pluggable visualization and workflow tools. This makes it an ideal choice for news hubs, team feed readers, custom report generators, open data mashups, and tailored data visualizations. Ready to use right away for tracking news, we also use Managing News as the base platform to quickly create solutions for these and other custom application needs.
Innovation News Installation Profile
The Innovation News installation profile provides all the tools and settings necessary to run a cross-media newspaper. Specifically, it allows the site's news to easily be exported as an RSS feed, as a Google Earth™ KML file, and as generic XML data.
Kendra Hub
The aim is to create a free open source software tool to simplify the management of digital media catalogues for syndicating to distribution platforms, promoting to new advanced semantic search engines and selling direct to consumers. This project, named Kendra Hub, will create a suite of Drupal modules to enable artists and content owners to manage their media assets and associated metadata from within one system that remains in their total control.
Music distribution for Drupal
The goal is to create a Drupal distribution tailored to the needs of musicians, record labels, and related communities.
FilmForge
A distribution (or profile) tailored to the needs of videomaking communities. FilmForge makes it simple to install and run your own video sharing site.
Features/Modules/Plugins
Media module
Offers a drop-in replacement to the basic Upload form element provided by Drupal. It provides an API for modules to hook into, so that the element can become a Rich Media GUI, offering tabs and drawers of Local files, Remote files (from S3, a cdn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), in addition to the standard 'Add file' upload button.
Media Mover
A set of modules which allows website administrators to easily create complex file conversion processes. The core of Media Mover is the media_mover_api module which creates a set of rules allowing multiple modules to interact with a file. Media Mover can take a file emailed to an email account, turn a file attachment into an FLV file, create a new node with the file data, and then save the file on an external file storage system like Amazon's S3 all at once. And that's just the start.
Discography module for Drupal
Designed to allow site admins who manage band/artist/label sites to insert discography information into a Drupal site, without having to jump through hoops with CCK & views.
Ongoing media development and collaboration
There's been a good of discussion regarding how to unify some of the media related efforts to increase collaboration, identify common needs, and pool resources on an ongoing basis. I think the combination of sprints and sessions on a regional level would be an effective way to produce great code, but also identify needs (talent, training, funding, etc.) and opportunities (sponsorships, clients, partners) on a local level.
In terms of a format, I think the building blocks are in the ongoing Media sprint and Open Media Camp. We just need to take a big picture look at how all these efforts relate and how to coordinate collaboration on a global/virtual and local level. A key role in all this would be chief project manager/cat herder. Being that many of these projects are currently (or could be) funded, there should be a way to compensate.
Would be great to hear some thoughts and ideas from stakeholders in the projects.
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Radio Engage, Open Media Project, and others...
Looping in this discussion on how these and other related projects would benefit from collaboration in a wide range of areas from development, documentation, training, funding/fundraising, marketing, promotion, business, hosting, sales, and services.
A great deal of this can be done by interfacing with our home grown project learning program (Drupal Kata) and the Drupal training/collaboration space (Drupal Dojo) on a global/virtual and local level.
The 'open' nature of these projects should give us a great deal of flexibility and opportunities for synergy.
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Kendra Hub and Music distribution for Drupal
Looping in two projects that probably have 90% overlap and are currently not tied to one particular client, sponsor, or initiative (Knight, Google, etc.). Furthermore, there is a great deal of compliment to projects like Open Media and Radio Engage...not only in the tech sense, but also as tools that empower citizens and producers.
Without easy to use, powerful, affordable tools for producers (musicians, filmmakers, photographers, writers, etc.), the content distributed over the networks (public or commercial) is going to be largely generated by those who can afford, know how to use, are aware of the tech.
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Thanks for this great resource
Last year, I was checking modules daily for beta & rc's that I could use to roll my own D6 media site. CCK and Views weren't even ready, modules were buggy, and it was a huge effort to get everything working in a very beta format. It's great to see how far multimedia projects have come.
Great projects to build upon
Updated to reflect the latest innovation in Drupal Media. A majority of these projects are fully funded and are/will be freely available as a installation profile. While there is 'some' collaboration between these projects, development is largely independent. After we relaunch the Drupal Dojo, the Drupal Kata (our homegrown project learning program) will be focusing these efforts to look for points of overlap, seek out and train new talent, and create new open source tools and solutions derived from the existing open source code. Join us here to participate, observe, or support this ongoing effort:
http://drupalkata.com/media/
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions