Posted by jdcreativity on January 6, 2014 at 2:49pm
Over the past few weeks as 2013 wound down and a new year spun up, I was feeling compelled to open up a conversation about the Community Media Drupal / CiviCRM kits.
I'm curious to hear about how organizations and individuals are faring with this solution for managing community media organizations and their video content. And I would like to know every instance of an organization using this software. I really hope that the adoption of these Starterkits has grown.
I'm very grateful to have been working with such a committed group of people, from other end users and admins like to myself to the developers. We now use the tools in the kit on a daily basis.
- For those who are already using the project tools, what bugs and issues do we need to rally around the most?
- With the constant changes in hyperlocal non-profit media - and I am talking about more than cable access here - where does the project go from here to meet the needs of our communities?
- With (busy) developers and (cash strapped) organizations moving into and out of the orbit of this project - how does a project like this maintain cohesion?
- What kind of collaborative work can we schedule and plan for in 2014?
Comments
PEG access in Fresno, here.
PEG access in Fresno, here. We're still considering what to do. We're stuck in Facil at the moment, but fortunately not too entrenched.
I'm more experienced with WordPress, never delved into Drupal. Being that we have a very small staff and I have lots of duties, I don't really have the time to experiment. We're looking at...
-- Open Media Project, hosted version: http://omp.omfound.org/content/pricing-public-access-tv-centers.
-- Media Center Manager (new, hasn't been released): http://creativemileage.com/mcm/
-- Drupal + CiviCRM plugins: http://cmdrupal.org, would have to hire a developer.
-- WordPress + CiviCRM: would have to hire a developer.
Two more options
Thanks for providing this. Additionally, I have found these two options.
http://pegmanagement.com/
http://www.rueshare.com/
It is nice to have all these flavors in one place.
There is also
There is also https://github.com/Frikanalen/frikanalen that drives http://beta.frikanalen.tv/. The Norwegian stations are working on a full, open source workflow including ingest and playback. For ingest, they are using the Open Broadcast Encoder (http://obe.tv/). If you bought an OBE server, it is very similar to the Telvue products. They both use the open source FFMPEG project as their core. The difference is you can also run OBE on your own hardware and/or customize it.
channelAustin Development and CM Drupal
At this time channelAustin is one of very few community media stations that is continuing to fund community media Drupal development in such a way that the code that is developed gets contributed back to the community. And right now channelAustin is the only community media station that has a contract with Drupal developer Kevin Reynen specifically for further code development.
A number of stations have benefited from the development work that channelAustin has funded. And in the past channelAustin has benefitted from the work done by other stations. Now, however, channelAustin does not seem to be benefitting much since there is little new development being funded by or performed by others that is being shared.
Several years ago with good will and intent a number of small, medium, and large community media centers decided to try to work together and develop a collaborative model to share in the creation of Drupal based Community Media tools. The general idea was to establish a common code base that each station could slightly modify to suit its own purposes. From this emerged the concept of the Community Media Starter Kit.
The Community Media Starter Kit was to have three versions, Easy, Moderate, and Difficult, and was to be made up of contributed Drupal modules, as well as specific community media Drupal modules. The idea was that stations could participate in a variety of ways: fund development, test code, write documentation. At one time there was talk about trying to fund a project manager. A goal was to create something that would attract other community media centers into joining. In fact, there has been great progress and if you look at Drupal.org at https://drupal.org/node/1694794 there's quite a bit of evidence of this.
Against that backdrop, however, for channelAustin the objective reality is this. We laid out a scope of work for our developer more than a year ago. Over the course of the past year there has been some progress, but we are at a point where some significant pieces are still not complete. For example, in October 2012 channelAustin started to use a new Telvue product for our playback system. The goal for this was a workflow diagrammed here https://drupal.org/node/1789464 in January 2013. We still have not reached the last step wherein VOD files submitted to Cloudcast are linked back to the user's show page.
Over the past year there have been multiple sources for the delay. I don't want to recount them all. One of the most recent cases was this past fall when for nearly a month work came to a stand still because of a major problem with Drupal.org and the ability to create and distribute packages.
Since we are in a new year, recently I queried Kevin about project status and what we can expect as a new timeline. To make a long conversation short, Kevin said his work on channelAustin's site can move along at a faster rate if he stops also being concerned about how the updates on channelAustin's site impact others and in particular the Starter Kits.
After better understanding his proposition I am urging him to do whatever it takes to speed up progress on channelAustin's development even if in his view that means stopping or putting on hold work on the Starter Kit updates.
I'm not exactly sure what this will mean for others using the Starter Kits right now. But I can see that for the one month of delay in November if he hadn't been worrying about the packages that we'd be that much farther along.
channelAustin has invested a lot resources both in terms of staff time and capital funds into this Community Media Drupal project. There are some parts of our site that are working well and parts that are not and in need of help.
Whereas the ideal of working together in some type of cooperative manner is a good ideal, I'm not so sure we all have the capacity to do it at the level required for it to work properly. For right now, we have to do what is best for channelAustin.
While all organizations don't have a budget for new development like channelAustin does, the hope was that stations with a budget would pay for development and stations without a budget would contribute in other ways. It doesn't seem that happened enough in 2013. How much of that is true may be open for debate. In any event, for the first part of 2014, channelAustin is going to take a hiatus from contributing openly and focus on our site. When we can get to a good place with our site, we can revisit this.
Well said
@stefanwray I want to appreciate your candor in sharing the needs of channelAustin. As one of the smaller stations involved in the project my immediate reaction was one of fear and doubt. Was there more I could have done? How could we do better? Is the party over?
But, after a few days, I've come to accept what you said. There really isn't any other way. And I think channelAustin can only be effective if it meets its needs and it certainly must work effectively with the person who knows this workflow better than anyone. The larger community media group is a loose collaboration, with many of us sharing hours of our time to help pitch in when we can and when we are able to clearly comprehend what is needed in a project with so many moving parts. The truth is, many of us will still be here using these tools when you hopefully decide to circle back in 6 months. If you could just let us know what is happening, it might be instrumental - but if not I understand.
This has been an ambitious project and one that despite difficulties has a lot of success to share around. The conundrum is that there are organizations with budgets that want to improve communication and improve the alignment of development, eradicate bugs and document configuration. I just speak for myself when I say that I'm thankful we've made it this far when the lead developer @kreynen also serves as the project manager. Forgive me if these terms are not perfect development speak, but he seems to lay out the pieces needed from as many players as possible as often as possible while at the same time writing the code, writing documentation and creating screencasts. It may not gentle, but has kept things from total disintegration!
If 2014 can see some maturation in the project, perhaps it can be around project organization. I truly feel we are a few months away from widening the net of adopters. A gentle but firm hand or hands that could help guide the agile/scrum process along and help prioritize the needs of organizations would be essential to grease the wheels and prevent the gears from locking in place. It may, by necessity, be more than "a little help", but hopefully perceived as a compliment to it as that is the intent.
As small steps towards improving communication I am working with @avguy @soniat @bagelche to revive the Google Hangouts - twice a month on Wednesdays. We also created a Google Group / email list: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/cmdrupal which anyone using the software or interested in the project can sign up for. It's small, but an email list may be a lower barrier of entry than GDO posts - especially for small configuration issues. It seemed worth a shot.
In the meantime, I hope is that there still can be organizing energy around the Easy Starterkit including continuing to refine documentation and a recognized Pantheon release.
The conundrum is that there
The thing about a do-acracy like Drupal and CiviCRM is you don't have to wait for permission from a project manager or commercial company to change the way something works or improve it. You can just do it. I don't think the issue is the amount of $$ spent or more project management. While an iterative process is essential, strict agile methodology is just a non-starter at this level. In this case, I feel like "project management" really translates to "someone else do the work" and the overhead of trying to get EDs on the same page on funding "everything" negates the advantage of having them fund "something"... and if they won't fund any single thing that isn't directly related to their site, they are never going to fund the work required to "finish" an 'anyone can install and just start using' version of a Community Media Starter Kits.
There are open issues in all of the cm_ modules that any developer could try to solve at any time. People committed to an open process already post issues, review fixes, and communicate openly while working through fixes regardless of their technical ability. This process happens despite the reluctance of many community media groups to adopt it. Remove the deprecated Certification field from CiviCRM Multiday Event is a great example of this process. The contribution from @GinkgoFJG is part of the new http://www.arlingtonmedia.org/ site.
The question isn't what needs to be done, but do community media groups really have the will to do it? Or are they just hoping someone else will do it for them cheaper and better than the commercial alternative?
"Doing it" is very different than saying you like the idea of open, free solutions. From an organizational perspective, "doing it" requires at least occasionally putting the needs of others groups before your own. Saying an organization is committed to collaborating, but never following through is actually worse than just saying they aren't interested or don't have the resources to make it a priority. While there were several large community media organizations spending money on Drupal and CiviCRM based solutions in 2013, they were so focussed on their own site and needs that little to nothing useful was shared back to the community. There are cases where code was shared without any documentation and screencasts of features without any code or the steps to reproduce this configuration.
For organizations that have been contributing openly, this basically translates to finger in their eye...
The only real difference between what channelAustin is doing now and what other large stations did in 2013 is that channelAustin had been doing more than saying they liked the idea of sharing. Now they are publicly saying that they are taking a break from sharing everything they fund vs. the organizations that said they were going to contribute back and never did it in 2013.
I don't want to throw other organizations under the bus, but you'd have to look pretty hard to find even small contributions from some of the groups who launched sites leveraging the work that's gone into CMDrupal. I'm not sure why an organization saying they were taking a break to focus on their own site created more backlash than the sites that never contributed their improvements back.
If there is really is $$ and the will to contribute, all an organization would need to do is post the question about they can do to help? What needs funding/support?
Personally I think this is a management level issue. I have said this before, but I believe that many of community media groups think that using a browser like Firefox is contributing to open source and that by using Drupal, CiviCRM, modules and documentation developed by other groups, they ARE contributing. They really don't want to be involved in making the sausage or even have a basic understanding of what's required.
I have a few theories about why contributing vs. using open source can be such a difficult concept to explain to organizations who couldn't run a channel if their members just watched the programming, but I don't think it's productive to focus on the why. It takes a lot of work to produce quality programming. You can't just say you want to produce videos like what you see on other channels. It requires learning new skills, improving with each video you produce, collaborating with other people who have skills you lack, and asking questions about the things you don't understand.
The 7.26 update to the Community Media Starter Kits was actually a turning point for the process we've used to maintain these distributions. The update to Feeds that added Entity support was the first time changes required for a major update were tested and documented before the update was released.
Moving forward, RTBC (Reviewed by the Community) should be standard all changes to the distribution have to meet. Any group involved should be able to point to their (or the developers they hire) contributions and understand how it has helped someone else. Groups that can't do that, should be reminded that by simply using open source they are a drain on the resources of the other organizations they claim to be collaborating with.
Sadly, the pubic version of this conversation is happening mainly between the people who already do most of the heavy lifting. After Stefan posted this, I sent several emails to people pointing them to this thread, reminding them of commitments they never followed through on in 2013, and asking them to respond honestly to what their plans where in 2014 so other groups could plan accordingly. Each of those emails resulted in an apology and a commitment to do better, but they only responded via email. I'm sending follow ups now asking them specifically to post their responses here.
A lot of effort has gone into creating Guides for Contributing, but obviously not enough since many people who contribute are still unaware that document exists and that they can contribute to it.