Posted by jdcreativity on December 10, 2008 at 11:23am
Do you have any ideas for how work being done between the Drupal community and the PEG TV community should be handled at the 2009 Alliance for Community Media Conference in Portland, OR in July? Any ideas of how it should NOT be handled? A workshop panel, a working session, an Open Media Update? Should we focus on "how to" or "what's new"? Should the focus be more on the Open Source model? Questions, questions.......
While this is not a formal proposal for ideas (which are due on January 15), let's face it - with finances tightening up everywhere - a trip to a national conference better be productive and it better have some valuable sessions.
What do you think?
Jason
Comments
Great Idea
Thanks for bringing this up Jason!
I definitely think starting with a panel is called for at the very least. I am also a big fan of hands on demos. And a workshop could be really great, maybe even do something semi-ambitious like convert over an existing or sample PEG website to Drupal in a workshop, just to show how easy it is.
One important consideration is to remember that Drupal is now being used in the PEG world in 2 parallel directions: Access centers are switching over their websites to Drupal, and also adopting Drupal as a station management application using the Open Media (DOM) and Access Center (MNN) profiles.
Also I don't see Drupal being limited to just a single panel or session. Last year at ACM Drupal was discussed in a number of panels, and it's seen tremendous growth since then.
-ƒorest
same old, same old
I received my Alliance for Community Media Early Bird Conference brochure for Portland and the structure is the same thing it has been since at least 2004. I think this unwillingness to adapt and change the conference structure is emblematic of the way open source models of rethinking community media have been received by the national.
It is disappointing to me and I'm venting. Now is a time for change, to be nimble and to find the support within our organizations to embrace the turbulent times ahead. The same 7 conference tracks again with no doubt, similar speakers. Never a thought of an unconference, or speaking to smaller centers.
It is no longer time to identify "community media at the crossroads" the 2009 conference slogan, two years ago we were "navigating the currents of change in community media", and 2005 was "waves of change", if I am not mistaken. Do you see a trend here?
Change is never easy, organizational change can be exceedingly difficult but I'm not sure if the Alliance for Community Media National Conference is still a relevant place to spotlight the work done in Drupal development in PEG Access. I think that Brian's post for regional unconferences might be a better way by concentrating efforts on development, training and deployment.
I couldn't agree more!
The ACM is not alone on this. Many traditional / established organisations have still not yet discovered the rich selection of collaborative and open meeting tools that are already being used by more savvy, and often younger groups. From methods that streamline meeting facilitation to formalised standards like Open Meeting and of course the remarkable un-conference format, and more technically, from collaborative tools such as wiki/s to agile communication platforms such as real time micro-blogging (eg. twitter) each of these is just a wave in this onslaught of historical transformation of social organisation that is bringing together crowd-sourcing, transparency and effective methodologies of social change.
And this media 'revolution' definitely has a critical 'local' component as evinced by Brian's post which you cited. Putting aside questions of how quickly the ACM can adapt to the coming times, perhaps one of the main roles for ACM should be a strong focus on maintaining local accountability and decision making in the PEG space, if that horse hasn't already escaped the barn.
For this reason, I believe ACM cannot afford to hold the national event in Washington DC only once every 3-4 years and spend the others providing admittedly nice junket locations such as Portland (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Pittsburgh.) While there is value in hosting in these other cities, what is lost by not having such a strong showing in DC each July is incalculable. The moneyed lobbyists on the "other side" don't take those summers off, and PEG/ACM ends up losing momentum with lawmakers in our Nation's capital.
As for this upcoming pow-wow (I recall that last year's was literally a pow-wow) however I am looking forward to using new media and new technologies and we will of course have a Drupal / Newtech BOF or 2...
my 2¢
~ Forest Mars
ps- On an upnote, this thread is the 2nd result on Google for ACM 2009 Portland.