Is this the first patch from one PEG location improving a module written by another PEG location?

Posted by kreynen on March 4, 2009 at 5:56pm

Darrick from Davis Access Media submitted a patch for MERCI this week. I know PEGEvent is in Drupal's CVS and there a number of Drupal modules developed for MNN that have been distributed as code dumps, but never made it into CVS. As far as I can tell, no one outside of the original developers has contributed to these projects.

I'm curious if anyone else knows of a patch from one PEG location improving a module written by another PEG location?

If not, I think as a community we may have taken the first step in getting PEG to move from "users" of open source to active contributors. It takes a lot more effort to develop modules that can stand alone, write the documentation so that other users understand how the module works, and manage updates and issues to the module through Drupal's CVS and issue tracking.

It is only worth the additional effort when people other than the original developers contribute. A single patch doesn't make it all worthwhile, but it does does give us hope that all the effort that has gone into structuring this project the "Drupal way" will pay off in the long run.

Thanks Darrick!

Comments

PEGevent

Posted by joegml on March 11, 2009 at 6:27pm

PEGevent is presently languishing on drupal.org to some degree. I'm still developing it and it is running smoothly at CCTV in Burlington, VT and LCATV in Colchester, VT.

It is a much smaller hammer approach to PEG program archiving, airtime scheduling and series definition than the DOM approach, but it might be a good module for smaller PEG stations.

I'd love to get some funding to clean up, generalize and Drupalize the code (it's not especially pretty, but it works!).

Joe Golden :: www.triangul.us :: People, Ideas, Connections

The work you put into moving

Posted by kreynen on March 15, 2009 at 1:22pm

The work you put into moving PEGEvent from Event to DateAPI has made it much easier to integrate with the Open Media modules, but there is a fundamental difference in the way Projects and Airings are handled. The Open Media approach is to consider the schedules in the playback servers as the "official" schedule. We've been able to get RSS feeds added to Leightronix NEXUS and Synergy to populate our Airings content type. Our goal was to build this as a playback server agnostic solution. Maestrovision sent us a server to test with, but we didn't have enough of this working before they asked for it back to know if the Airings from RSS approach will work with Maestrovision.

Does Maestrovision offer an RSS feed of scheduled playback events?

Moving to Organic Groups to handle Projects is part of our self service approach. The owner of a Project node determines who else can add Shows, Blogs, Wikis, and Reservations for that Project as well as how additional users are added. Projects also give Producers a homepage with a human readable URL they can promote like...

http://www.denveropenmedia.org/project/vlog-tv
http://www.denveropenmedia.org/project/brainiacs

http://www.urbanapublictelevision.org/project/canopy
http://www.urbanapublictelevision.org/project/city-urbana-175th-celebrat...

Every Project has it's own MediaRSS enabled RSS feed making it easy for users to subscribe to have every new Show added to a Project downloaded automatically with a client like Miro.

How hard do you think it will be to get PEGEvent to support the Open Media om_project content type when scheduling a series?

Integration and Data Models

Posted by joegml on March 16, 2009 at 3:31pm

We had discussions on shared data models earlier. I think as long as there's no conflict between data models, we should be able to play nice together. My basic data structures are programs, showings and series. A series has zero or more programs. A program has zero or more showings at specific times. So one has showings of a program in a certain series. I think PEGevent's lightweight approach and data model make sense to many smaller Access centers.

It seems that PEGevent's "series" might be a subset of your "project?" Can a project have multiple series within it? It looks like all program titles in http://www.denveropenmedia.org/project/vlog-tv start with "Vlog". Could we say that all programs in this group are in the Vlog series? If so, there seems like a one-to-one correspondence between "projects" and "series," with the data in my series being a subset of the data in your project.

MV and RSS feeds: I'm not sure on that one. We export a playlist to MV and so haven't looked at the other direction. At LCATV we take an export of a playlist and use that as an import into Drupal.

To better answer your final question, I'd need to see a data model, but I don't see a conflict. It might be helpful to have a shared glossary to avoid confusion: I think the jargon is used in different ways by different folks in the community.

Joe Golden :: www.triangul.us :: People, Ideas, Connections

Our structure

Posted by kreynen on March 17, 2009 at 3:14pm

Our structure is...

Project
- Show
-- Video
-- Airing
- Reservation
- Wiki
- Event
- Blog

Projects themselves have node reference to om_project_type. At DOM, project types can be a series, a single episode, a PSA/Promo. Currently we're not acting on any of those node references, other than to change the way DOM's Producers are adding promos for to their Projects. In the past, they'd just add shows and promos to the same project. Now, a Timeslot can be linked to a specific Project and configured to automatically schedule based on rules like...

Air the newest show
Air shows in a specific order
Re-air the most recent show until there is a newer show

Our videos are placed into directories named after the Project, but do not contain the projects name. We're actually trying to get Producers to stop including the Project name and Episode number in the Node title, but we've talked about adopting the naming convention bittorrent sites use for episodes of shows. We've also recognized the need to include another unique id in the name so that if a Show with video named Episode 1 is moved from one site to another, it doesn't cause a problem if the video itself is just named episode1.mpg.

I agree completely on the jargon, which is why we renamed what our station was calling "themes". Themes referred to a block of time that shared a topic like Youth or Politics. Those are now called Timeslot Themes. Timeslots are the "blocks" of time. Obviously in the Drupal word trying to use themes and blocks to mean different things in different contexts would have caused a lot of confusion.

Using OMP modules at non-beta testing sites

Posted by emilyf on May 14, 2009 at 6:21pm

I have been hiding out of country for the past couple months, and now that I am back in reality (or unreality depending on how you look at it), I am trying to get a good grasp of where OMP is at. I've been perusing this group, have checked out the module postings on drupal.org, read through http://groups.drupal.org/node/20341, and have looked at om.civicpixel.com. Though things seem scattered about and I am not necessarily finding exactly what I'm looking for, I commend this project on all the community participation and open process it is following. It's fantastic.

There are a bunch of PEG centers (and I'll continue to use VT as an example) getting ready to invest in CMS integrations with their playback systems. These PEG centers are obviously not in the OMP beta group. As a Drupal developer, but not yet a contributor to the code in this project, how difficult is it for myself and others like myself to take pieces (or all) of OMP and get them going. Most of the docs I read seem pretty general, so if I'm missing some detailed info please point me in the right direction. http://groups.drupal.org/node/20341 seems like a great start -- are there more details somewhere?

For a TelVue-based station, for example, how buggy is the scheduling system going to be from OMP to hook this in? Can it even be done without you guys yet? What about the video integration? Is there a priority listing of which systems are working best/easiest and which are hardest to configure? If I or other developers were to attempt to do integrations with these modules would you welcome us to participate and possibly answer integration questions? I see that the project pages say priority is given to beta sites. Does that mean we will be ignored? I also saw the post on PEG-related modules and whether anyone has actually debugged or patched another's module...this could potentially provide those opportunities.

Where do we start?

Emily, I really wish you

Posted by kreynen on May 15, 2009 at 2:01am

Emily,

I really wish you could have been here for the Open Media Camp. It really helped to get everyone on the same page... both Drupal developers working with media in several spaces and PEG specific development.

Our timeline has always been to have "the system" in a downloadable/installable/documented form by (but more likely in) July. I think we are still on track to make that happen. MERCI is definitely the furthest along and scheduling the least complete, but every part of the system including theming and documentation is still moving forward.

There's a lot of theming in TVframe for custom Blocks and Views. Now that we have a better idea of what stations have in common and what is different, those Blocks, Views, and theming files are (slowly) being rolled back into the modules that control the related content types. This was always part of plan for the beta process, but obviously not something we promoted when looking for stations to partner with. Instead of telling stations they'd have to update modules on a weekly basis once development moved beyond the framework phase, we focused on the fact that the stations would have more influence over the direction modules are developed.

We just had another productive session about MERCI today. We showed what was done in the last updates and talked about where some of the features that are starting to show up in the interfaces are headed. We're planning on rolling another release early next week that wraps up this round of features. This iterative process of getting half finished . beyond this next update and bug fixes, additional features that get added to MERCI will be driven by funding.

The sad fact is it's still too soon to try to implement this without our team to support you and we just don't have the resources to solicit feedback and provide support beyond the 6 beta locations we are already working with.

We are going to out on the east coast implementing in Boston and Amherst as well as presenting at the Open Video Conference. If you have time to sit in with us, we'd love to have you.

We're also trying to plan another Open Media Camp-like event before the national ACM conference.

We've also started tagging issues within the om_ modules as novice... not to be condescending, but that's that standard webchick proposed for Drupal.org. These are issues that anyone with some basic php and Drupal experience should be able to fix. Submitting the fix as a patch that can be applied and reviewed by the community not only saves us time, but reinforces the fact that this project is owned by a community of contributors and is not something Denver Open Media is providing as a vendor.

A few more questions

Posted by emilyf on May 15, 2009 at 6:33pm

Thanks for the response, Kevin. Wish I could have been at the camp, too. I was doing volunteer work in Kenya from mid-Feb until last week, and I didn't know the Open Media Camp was even happening. Oh well.

A few more questions.

If stations are willing to put up money, are you willing to provide some integration assistance to developers who are familiar with what you are doing?
If stations are willing to participate in the documentation and give you deliverables, would this change your mind on having outside integration?
If not, and stations are willing to put up the money, are you willing to do an integration and train developers (like myself) to a point where we could participate in your beta process -- essentially act like the other centers are doing now but receive a bit less hands-on from you guys once the local developer is trained?
Are you presenting a general overview at the Open Video Conference or going into specifics?
Do you know what days you will be implementing Boston and Amherst stations? Is it possible for me to sit in on these integrations? How many days do you spend at each?
Is there a place in this group that I can see your schedules for where you will be when?
Do you have weekly IRC or conference calls/video chats with your beta stations? Is there a particular reason I or other developers couldn't listen in on these to stay up-to-date? Or do minutes or something exist online?

As far as the National ACM conference, I would love to attend an Open Media Camp. I presently have no money to attend the conference or even get to Portland. But please let me know if you do schedule it, and I will try to find a way.

Obviously money plays a role

Posted by kreynen on May 19, 2009 at 2:20pm

Obviously money plays a role in determining priorities, but our biggest commitment is to Knight and the 6 partner locations. We just don't have the resources to do more than we are already doing now before July.

As far as presenting and support, we love getting into specifics when we feel it might result in more participation and are always going to spend more time supporting someone who has already contributed patches or documentation than someone who only adds features requests. The Open Video Conference would be a general presentation. If we do an Open Media Camp-like event before, that would be a mix of general Drupal UI, workflow, and best practices in one track and another track of hard core developer related presentations.

The dates we have for our east coast trip are June 15-19 at BNN, 19-20 at Open Video Conference, and 22-25 at Amherst. You are more than welcome to sit in on everything we're doing.

We do have bi-weekly calls that are specific training on specific topics, bi-weekly one on one calls with upcoming implementations to discuss their progress/issues, and someone is almost always on #drupal-openmedia on IRC. Unfortunately, not much of this gets recorded in a useful manner. We did record the last week's session about MERCI, but haven't gotten that posted to http://www.openmediaproject.org/.

Do you have an account on that server? That's where the master pages of documentation are edited and some of our work that isn't quite ready for CVS is shared. If you don't already have an account there, you should request one.