Who's who?

Hey all.

I'm a new Drupal user. In terms of technical experience, I was the IT Manager at Tredway, Lumsdaine & Doyle, a law firm in Southern California, and a Project Manager at Thomson Elite, a legal software company.

I recently joined Denver Open Media as an AmeriCorps VISTA. I'll be at DOM working on the Open Media Project for the next year. Having minimal exposure to Drupal and public access television, I'm jumping in, headfirst, to learn and contribute as much as I can.

Basically, I'm the new guy.

Best!

Howdy,

I might be one of the very few international users on this group so far, being from Sweden. I am the station manager at the Open Channel Vaxjo in the town of Vaxjo, Sweden. We are a staff of 3 people (one full-time, two half-time) + a couple of interns serving 22 500 households + the web with our channel and are currently in the process of upgrading much of our equipment and our tools.

Up until now we have used CMS Made Simple as the CMS tool for our website. As much as I love that I think Drupal does a better job for web sites with a lot of community interaction. Currently I'm digging into Drupal, learning about how it works and with time learning more about module development too.

As for my technical skills, I have done a fair amount of (X)HTML and CSS work, and do know a little bit of PHP and MySQL, as well as Microsoft Access (yeah, I know...). With the small number of staff at our station I am the main guy responsible for this, as well as the computer network and much of the technical stuff.

I am also on the board of the National Association of Open Channels in Sweden, where some of my responsibilities are program exchange/file sharing as well as license issues around this. I'm also working with playout solutions and web issues.

I attended the recent Alliance for Community Media conference in Washington and have been visiting Denver Open Media, both of which were really exciting. I'm still in the US for another few days, now on the east coast, to investigate in getting equipment for our channel: playout/bulletin board as well as equipment for our studio/control room.

This Open Media project is really exciting and I very much look forward to both follow and contribute to the development! Of particular interest is the file sharing tools, although I understand that much of it may be dependent on other things being developed first.

I'm new to Denver Open Media and Public Access, but not to Drupal. I've been involved in Drupal on and off since 4.5. Like many early Drupal adopters actually took to Drupal after several years of work on a custom CMS. I liked Drupal because from a schema perspective, it looked really similar to what our work at Quebecor had evolved into after several years of development.

I introduced Drupal while at Bradley University as an easy to use, cost effective solution to maintain the department sites in the Slane College of Communication and Fine Arts. My position at Bradley was Director of Instructional Technology, and while I did get to use my development skills from time to time, the majority of my work was a mix of meetings, budgeting, and scheduling. So I left Bradley for what I thought was going to be my dream job developing tools for journalists in Drupal for a new journalism master's program at the Reynold's School of Journalism at the University of Nevada Reno. Unfortunately Cole Campbell, the new Dean of J-School with the vision to start the new master's program and build a web community focused on the environmental issues at Lake Tahoe, died unexpectedly in a car accident. Despite winning several awards fro the innovative work we did that year, the remaining faculty decided to devolve OurTahoe.org from an innovative Drupal site to a more basic blog using WordPress. I decided it was time for me to move on.

The Open Media Project not only gives me the opportunity to focus on Drupal again, but it also help me settle a long running debate I've had with a friend about the future of television.

Hi everyone, I'm Tom Wolf. I'm a member of the Chicago Technology Cooperative, a small Chicago-based firm that builds web sites & applications for nonprofits nation-wide. We have worked on just about every type of project imaginable in that space and our primary platform of choice is Drupal. I'm joining in the discussion here because of our recent work on the Vocalo.org project. The site is a new take on public radio with a focus on community involvement (both online and off).

Vocalo.org site is now in its second major version (in 14 months) and this time around, we wrote a set of tools from the ground up in Drupal 6. It sounds as though we have found ourselves addressing the common problems of scheduling, community submission, and presentation of content. Our focus was less on back-end integration and more on creating a strong community website which focused on the re-use of media, but I think that the pieces are the same across all of our experiences, just arranged slightly differently.

As project lead on the Vocalo.org project and on our upcoming push to release modules based on the work we did for that project, I'm hoping to work with everyone in this community to help figure out how to better use Drupal effectively for community media projects.

Cheers,
~t-dub

--
Tom Wolf
project manager + developer

Chicago Technology Cooperative
http://chicagotech.org

Well, hello!

My name is Peter Poire-Odegard and I work with Portland Community Media (PCM) in Oregon. I have been lurking in the PEGspace forums for about a year after originally hearing about them from Jason and Keri at the Alliance for Community Media conference in Minneapolis.

I wanted to make sure that PCM was heading down what I saw as the appropriate (read open and collaborative) technical path as we implemented a host of new technology at our center. My position in Portland Community Media is partially producer facilitator, educator and, temporarily heading up the media education department. I'm starting to wear my resident geek hat though.

I hope to be able to contribute from my varied experience in the community media field (DeepDish TV, Quote…Unquote and MediaBridges) as well as from a technological design and education perspective in my current role at PCM.

I'm really excited.

I'm also from Denver Open Media/Deproduction and trying to support the Civic Pixel team in fulfilling our needs as a community media resource in Denver, and serving the larger needs of the Community Media/ Public Access community nation-wide.

I'm not a developer, more of a video producer-turned-administrator and fundraiser. I've helped to form several noncommercial endeavors in Denver, all with the common aim of putting the power of media, technology, and information in the hands of the community. That's the game I've chosen to hand over my life to.

I see technology as the greatest tool possible for leveling the playing-field and giving every person on the planet an opportunity to reach their full potential to engage in society and create the world they want to live in. I see the media as an untapped resource for democratic social communication that has been previously misdirected to serve only the interests of commercialism; and I see the merger of media and technology as a possibility for total social participation, unbridled & diverse self-expression, and authentic interpersonal connection across all boundaries.

I'm excited about this group, this project, and the opportunity we have when we cooperate towards a common vision.

Tony

Whatever your first issue of concern, media had better be your second, because without change in the media, the chances of progress in your primary area are far less likely. http://denveropenmedia.org

I'm Matthew Galvin a media geek based in Santa Cruz, CA currently working with CMAP-TV in Gilroy (among other projects). I've been involved in a number of commercial software development and open source/community spirited projects, as well as producing media for television, radio, cinematic release, IP distribution, and CD/DVD, doing lots of broadcast and datacenter engineering, working with ATM and IP network deployments on fiber, CAT5/6, microwave, and 802.11x.

I'm not usually a developer - I prefer the rigors of integration, documentation, and the operational sides of technical projects. I am a capable project manager, but I really like to get in and get dirty with projects. I pretty much like to do everything except QA, I'd rather climb a 125 foot radio tower in a lightning storm stan run QA process. I work on Mac, Windows, and Fedora Core Linux.

I was initally pretty skeptical about any group affiliated with the ACM. I've been keelhauled by the community media national scene - more than once. I got dragged out to Denver for ACM West 2008 and realized that this was a great group of people and that I better get on board.

I'm hoping to contribute by helping with implementation and helping match needs assessments with developer interest. This will probably keep me writing spec docs, scope of work(s), enforcing SOP, as well as being an advocate for non-developers and wrestling with some of the crazy-assed workflows in some of these PEG centers and media organizations. I hope to also contribute a few lines of choice code, and probably some UI and graphic design help as needed.

I've got interest and experience in a lot of areas, and I am always learning new stuff. Some of my favorite open source tools/toys are Joomla, VLC, phpSurveyor, Moodle.

I'm trying to get dirty with Flash 3 and Flex and HD video.

Tech Geek in Charge for Acadiana Open Channel in Lafayette, La USA. We were looking at doing stuff like this a few years ago.. However the code wasn't there at the time. Nice to see so many people involved. We are currently rolling out our test server with Drupal6 and some various modules to get our feet wet.

Looking forward to what this group is doing.

kw

Hi Everyone

I'm the new Community Media Coordinator at Amherst Community Television in Amherst, Mass. My background's in filmmaking, academia and IT, sort of all at the same time.

Whilst a grad student I taught several different film-watching and film-making courses (amongst other esoteric delights), while also working variously editing video and audio, community organizing, writing tech manuals, working for dot com startups (when they were still called that), and making websites for Unions, Community Organizations and myself.

I suppose I'm more of an aesthetician and designer than coder, but I started using Drupal when I co-founded an Open Source Design Collective three years ago. Life rather got in the way pretty much straight after that, so I'm just coming back to Drupal now, and am excited about being part of this vast and wonderful project.

Cheers
Craig

Hi All

I'm the Director of Operations of Davis Media Access. We operate the public access channel, handle the operations of the educational channel in a partnership with the school district and operate the LPFM radio station KDRT 95.7FM.

I am new to Drupal, but have a lot of experience contributing to open source projects (http://sox.sourceforge.net, http://rivendellaudio.org being the main ones.) I code in C/C++, php, perl and bash. Am self taught and like to hack a lot. I've been at DMA for about 10 years and before that I was Chief Engineer at KDVS 90.3FM, the college radio station at UC Davis where I got my BS in Chemical Engineering. Before that I was anarchist punk rocker.