channelAustin has been working with a team of developers in Denver at Denver Open Media on our implementation of the Open Media Project tools here. The Denver developers were funded by a $380,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. We have not incurred any costs for this other than staff time. We have had excellent local volunteer support for our Ubuntu server from Rich Vasquez . He has also contributed to the project by writing open source code in Ruby for data to move between an MS access db on an XP machine to MySQL on the Ubuntu box.
We are currently looking for additional volunteer support from Drupal developers at all levels of expertise to help with beta testing and debugging. This would be an opportunity for you to test drive and gain exposure to a number of contributed Drupal modules that are being combined together in an innovative way. Some of the modules deployed in this project are CCK, FeedAPI, Organic Groups, and Media Mover, to name a few. The project's network architecture is mildly complex and involves both Drupal and CiviCRM installed on top of Ubuntu on a Sun Server connected to another another Ubuntu box loaded with FFMPEG for encoding .flv files, also connected to two windows machines. One of those runs Content Agent, another video encoder, while the other is associated with the station's video playback system.
This is somewhat of a technically complicated undertaking for a non-profit organization with limited funds and a staff of which just a few have a basic level of understanding of Drupal. Yet we are managing so far. Working collaboratively with Denver folks as well as staff from 6 other stations has been great. There is some room, though, for support from Austin's Drupal community on this project. We'd like to do a demo for the Austin Drupal Users Group and involve local Drupalers in the project.
If you are interested in the project at any level, please get in touch with me. We don't have any money to pay you, but we can offer in-kind services, training, and access to HD video cameras and studios.
Comments
Working on a program
Hi Stefan! If you visit the open media irc, you'll probably notice a lot of conversation about creating a custom mentoring program on the partner station/Drupal user group level. As the program will reward stipends to apprentices and mentors, there should be additional incentive for the local user group and companies to support.
Details forthcoming once we sift through all the recent discussion.
Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions
Gus Austin