The Community Media Drupal Initiative begins the week with some good news.
- channelAustin and MNN have signed an agreement on Drupal collaboration
- Amherst Media's Craig Sinclair has accepted a job at MNN
- Community Media Starter Kits are now available on Pantheon
channelAustin and Manhattan Neighborhood Network have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to establish a collaborative agreement and framework regarding the continued development, implementation, and use of Community Media Drupal, specifically in regards to the Community Media Starter Kit (Difficult). The agreement between the two stations will assure that the code base shared by both stations remains in sync. The significance of this MOU is the fact that it is the first formal and structured collaborative agreement among any of the community media centers or public access stations working on shared Drupal development. It has the potential to be a model or example and basis for a broader system of shared governance and decision making regarding mutual open source development in this community.
Craig Sinclair, who has worked at Amherst Media since 2008 first as Community Media Coordinator and then as Director of Media Technologies, has accepted a new position at MNN as the Digital Media Manager. He begins work there on May 13. Craig was at Amherst Media when that station became one of 6 "beta" stations for what was the Open Media Project. He has continued to be involved with the Community Media Drupal Initiative, having attended the first Community Media Drupal Summit in Austin in 2012 and participated in the peer-to-peer network of the dozen or so stations currently involved in the project. Craig at MNN will be a benefit to MNN as it launches its new CM Drupal web system and a benefit to the larger CM Drupal network.
The Community Media Drupal Starter Kit (Easy and Moderate) is now available on Pantheon. The starter kit includes the modules, themes, and libraries often used by community media organizations. Pantheon is an all-in-one service for Drupal development and hosting. By making the Community Media Starter Kit available on Pantheon community media centers will be able to download an entire package of community media and other Drupal modules and build a site in Pantheon's sandbox before launching a site on Pantheon or on another web hosting service.
All this good news come 3 weeks before the Alliance for Community Media Conference in San Francisco that will be preceded by a one day 2013 CM Drupal Camp. The ACM Conference will feature a workshop titled "The State of the Community Media Drupal Initiative" where more details about the latest developments will be shared. This workshop will be on Thursday, May 30, at 10:45 AM at the ACM Conference in SF.
The 2013 CM Drupal Camp will take place on Tuesday, May 28 at the University of San Francisco. To see if this something for you and then register to attend, start by taking a short "quiz".