Western Mass Drupal Meetup - Thursday, June 25, 2009 @ 6:00 pm

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
Rick Hood's picture
Start: 
2009-06-25 18:00 - 20:00 America/New_York
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

Our next meeting will be held at ACTV in Amherst, MA: http://www.actvamherst.com on Thursday, June 25 at 6pm

Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/mr5dxn

Folks from the Denver Open Media Project will be out to tell us what they are up to. Denver is part of the Drupal Open Media Project (http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project) and they are working finding the ideal Drupal setup for community television stations, like ACTV.

Thanks to Craig Sinclair of ACTV (synchlayer) for organizing this.

AGENDA

6:00-7:00
Regular meeting - perhaps two topics of discussion:

7:00 - 8:30
Presentation from the Denver Open Media Project folks.

See you then!

Comments

IRC?

forestmars's picture

This sounds really great and I wish I could make it over there, but it is a school night, and NYC -> Amherst is FIVE hours on the train!.

So, hoping there will be IRC channel discussion for those that would like to be there, but are geographically challenged.

Is there an IRC channel for

Z2222's picture

Is there an IRC channel for Western Mass? That would be great.

--
My Twitter

IRC for Western Mass

forestmars's picture

Dunno if there is an IRC channel for Western Mass, but there is a channel for OpenMedia that could be used for this meeting.

Going forward I'd suggest an IRC channel for the whole NorthEast region.

As a side note, New York does have a channel on freenode-- #drupalnyc

There isn't one. How do you

Rick Hood's picture

There isn't one. How do you do that? ...add a channel to freenode? Or is there another way? I'm not up on that stuff.

IRC channels

forestmars's picture

You just start the channel.

If it is not registered, you're op, and can admin it, register etc.

If it's registered but you re-created it, you may or may not have ops depending on how the creator set it up.

There's plenty of documentation online, albeit in various levels of comprehensibility.

  • Forest Mars

Freenode

Z2222's picture

I would use it...
#westernmassdrupal?

#drupalwesternmass

Rick Hood's picture

I applied for registration of #drupalwesternmass I learned that you can start a channel simply by typing /join #drupalwesternmass in XChat (or whatever you use for IRC client) but to have it show up in the list of channels on freenode you have to register it. I'll let you know when its up.

ACTV is going to video this

Rick Hood's picture

ACTV is going to video this so maybe it will be online at some point.

Western Mass Drupal Meetup Notes & Thanks

Rick Hood's picture

Many thanks to Craig Sinclair, everyone at ACTV (http://www.actvamherst.com) and Denver Open Media (http://www.denveropenmedia.org/) for a great meetup last night.

Brief summary here:

For the first part of the meeting we heard about D4D (http://boston.design4drupal.org/) from people who attended, talked a bit about theming in general and talked about what people use for media (modules etc.).

Links from D4D, theming and media:

Grid theming:
http://boston.design4drupal.org/session/accelerated-grid-theming-ninesixty

Skinr:
http://boston.design4drupal.org/session/introducing-skinr-new-and-more-m...

Zen:
http://drupal.org/project/zen
Great starting theme.

Newswire:
http://drupal.org/project/newswire

Imagefield, Imagecache and for image handling:
http://drupal.org/project/imagefield
http://drupal.org/project/imagecache

IMCE for inline images (images in the Body field):
http://drupal.org/project/imce
Used in conjunction with WYSIWYG editors such as TinyMCE and FCKeditor.
It was mentioned that there is a limit to number of files one can use with IMCE, so another recommendation made was to use Moxiecode’s image manager: http://www.moxiecode.com/products.php which is not free, but cheap.

JQuery Media for video and audio handling:
http://drupal.org/project/jquery_media
http://www.drupaltherapy.com/
http://www.drupaltherapy.com/filefield

Embedded media field for video and audio handling:
http://drupal.org/project/emfield

Media Mover for processing media files (video mainly):
http://drupal.org/project/media_mover

[Let me know what I missed above.]

From the Denver Open Media:

Folks from DOM described a Drupal distribution they are building for community television stations that would enable the “User-Automation Broadcast Workflow” as described here:

http://www.denveropenmedia.org/node/38

They received a grant from the Knight Foundation to do this. There is lots of info here, including custom modules developed for this: http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project

They use Organic Groups to create what they call a Project. Shows are then created under Projects and scheduled to play on the station’s media player (the thing that sends video out on cable). At the same time, web versions of the video are posted to the Project page so people can see online versions of each show.

Terms:
Project = normally a series, such as Democracy Now
Show = an episode of a series, such as the June 25, 2009 episode of Democracy Now.

The system is being set up on various beta sites – community TV stations from Portland OR to Boston MA. ACTV is one of the beta sites.

Longer term plans include sharing of Projects and Slows between each station.

This was very cool and I see how this is creating a great platform for the ultimate community television station.

The Video will be up on Monday

synchlayer's picture

Thanks everyone for making last night such a success.

I'll post the video on the ACTV site Monday and add links to it here when it's up.

Western Massachusetts

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds: