Garrett congrats on the launch of KHUM. We're knee deep in developing a Drupal radio distribution for public media stations as part of our work on a Knight grant for the News Challenge. We are also using the current release of station but finding that we need to make modifications based our needs as it relates to shows and the schedule display.
I've been trying to figure out how to create more collaboration between public radio stations and Drupal development. In particular I've tried to reach out to Drewish to understand how we can pitch in to support future development of the station module. We're here at DrupalCon and have met up with a few folks using Station and also talked to folks using FeedAPI to create schedules for programming (WGBH and WETA).
Is there enough interest to host a BoF group tomorrow? Drewish are you available at all tomorrow? It would be great to connect and see how we might be able to collaborate around Station to push it forward. We are hosting a BoF around Public Media Geek Squads (building out volunteer groups to help build geek resources for public media stations) at 10:15. But I'm thinking that it would be great to have a specific gathering around the future of the station module. Leave comments here if you are at DrupalCon and we can figure out a good time to gather a group of drupal radio folks.
Comments
Did this happen?
Wondering if this did happen, and if so if there were any conclusions?
Yes public radio folks (and
Yes public radio folks (and other interested types) met up twice to understand where/how collaboration could happen. Here are some of the outcomes/discussion that took place.
The State of Station
It does sound like drewish is looking for a new module maintainer for the Station project. I don't know who would be an appropriate party to take this on, we don't currently have the heavy programming chops to take this on. However, we are interested in helping in other ways with use cases, user interface, issue queue mgmt and documentation.
After having implemented parts of station, we are understanding how it might evolve going forward. With the Radio Engage project, we are adding content types and making modifications to some of the existing ones. I'll be providing a comprehensive write-up on how we have used the module and where improvements might be desirable. It has been an interesting journey from our perspective just to understand the state of audio file handling in Drupal 6.
Public Media Collaboration
There was a great deal of interest in collaborating among the different places doing Drupal development -- and also just "technology development" in public media. There are some other groups tackling various sides of this and it isn't clear to me how it all comes together. Meanwhile, many of the folks from the BoF have signed up on the RadioEngage.com site and we have a conversation group happening there.
However, I think there needs to be a more generic place for this conversation. Which leads me to the public media group we just had approved on g.d.o (http://groups.drupal.org/public-media). This is where we could house specific Drupal projects and conversation in the public radio and public broadcasting space. Radio Engage will have a Drupal distribution, PBS has contributed a chat module and there will likely be other Drupal development that can be cataloged under that group.
Meanwhile there are two other groups I'm involved with that intersect this space -- Public Media Collaborative (http://publicmediacollaborative.pbwiki.com/) which is aiming to address more of the social media side and Pubforge.org which is specifically providing oversight for open source development for public media. This is all information I'll plan on adding to the public media group for easy reference.
Whew, now I put my head back down to RadioEngage ... we're working hard to get a prototype out the door so we can start to get everyone's feedback! Iteration here we come ...
Cheers.