Developers

Kevin and crew--

At OMPCamp in Portland we started (but did not conclude) a discussion about running / installing Drupal from the CVS repositories. I was under the impression that installing Drupal from CVS made updating and patching the system significantly easier. My takeaway on the conversation was that it wasn't as great an idea as I'd been led to believe.

Can you share your thoughts more completely on this idea? Is there a price to be paid for that convenience? Is it okay for other systems, just not OMP? Did I totally misread the (brief) discussion?

Thanks!

The following DRAFT is being presented to the meeting of the Alliance for Community Media Board of Directors in Portland on July 14, 2009. - Stefan

DRAFT

Resolution on Open Standards

Alliance for Community Media Board of Directors

Whereas, some Alliance for Community Media members and affiliated organizations want to develop the means to share programming and therefore share video files;

Whereas, the ability to share video files across different platforms requires that metadata standards, file format standards, and other standards be created;

Here is a document that shows what we believe are the required fields for Synergy Broadcast System. We will need to map metadata created by the OM Project to these fields.

I've attached a diagram of channelAustin's Open Media System integration for purposes of sharing how we are integrating Open Media tools with our Synergy Broadcast System. Diagram indicates the three environments - Linux (Ubuntu), Windows, and Mac - and shows the pathways between workstations, encoders, servers, and archive.

The red line indicates a pathway that is incomplete as of this writing.

I work for raSANTIAGO, a consultancy in Portland, Oregon; we do a lot of work with CiviCRM. We've been working with the good folks at Portland Community Media to convert their membership data from Facil to CiviCRM.

I've put together an annotated set of MySQL queries that I'm using to import PCM's data; we're also releasing it "into the wild" for anyone to adapt and use for their own similar conversion efforts.

We've been using the Taxonomy XML to import the hierarchical taxonomy we've been using for genres in Project, Show, and Timeslot Theme. Taxonomy XML now supports taxonomy as a service.

If you've used CiviCRM, particularly the CiviEvent feature, you'll know that for creating events there is a field for the Start Date and one for the End Date. This is great if your event (or class) is a one-day only event. There doesn't appear to be any provision for the same event taking place for more than 1 day, such as a class that meets from 1:00 to 4:00 PM on a Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. How have any of you who have started to use, or are considering using, CiviCRM for event registration (for classes or other purposes) dealt with this?

Summary

The following is a proposal from Open Media Camp participants for a process to develop video metadata standards, particularly for video genre types. The proposal is to involve the Open Web Foundation to establish such a process.

The Open Media Project

The Open Media Project was initiated by Denver Open Media in 2008, and is now a collaborative effort with Amherst Community Television, Boston Neighborhood Network, channelAustin, Davis Media Access, Portland Community Media, and Urbana Public Television. The project's mission is to develop and distribute an open source tool set that will enable public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations to work together as user-driven, locally-focused, alternative media networks. Based in Drupal, the project is developing a modular, web-based system that makes local user-generated media more accessible locally and nationally through digital distribution. Leveraging thousands of open-source contributors, the tools are relatively easy and affordable to implement.

Open Media Camp

The Open Media Camp held in Denver, Colorado on April 18 and 19, 2009, brought together Drupal media module developers and implementers, including representatives from all but one of the Open Media Project partner sites. The Drupal developers who attended maintain some of the key media modules. The two-day camp at Denver Open Media's facilities was organized in an "unconference" format. There were sessions focused on metadata standards, video modules, CCK and Views modules, and media management, as well as on topics specifically related to the Open Media Project such as theming and MERCI, the reservation module.

Existing Video Metadata Practices

Public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations approach video metadata and media genre type standards in a variety of ways. Some centers operate with no standards at all and allow open or free tagging, where users choose their own tags or key word descriptors for their video programs. PegMedia, a media transfer site for PEG (Public, Education, Government) community television stations, with more than 400 stations and producers, only uses open tagging. They have no standards for genre or subject types. Rather than using a pre-defined taxonomy, this bottom-up method of open tagging generates what some call a folksonomy.

These are the links I referenced in the quick overview of metadata use in the Open Media System.

Working Within the Box to Modifying Existing Standards...
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2009/03/second-implementation-of-the-open-med...
http://pubforge.org/pubblog/2009/03/31/lawrence-lessig-at-sxsw-on-open-m...
http://www.pbcore.org/PBCore/subjectAuthorityUsed.html
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_290-hopper.html

Existing Organizations...
http://pbcoreresources.org/
http://www.pegmedia.org/
http://openwebfoundation.org/

I resolved a problem I was having with Wysiwyg API. And in case you run into the issue, here is what happened and what to do about it.

For channelAustin's implementation of the Open Media Project, we are using the Wysiwyg API ( http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg ). This is a step up from what Denver Open Media is using.

When I created content, and tried to edit content, I got a black edit screen when in the Full HTML input mode. I searched all over the Drupal site for an answer, but didn't find one.

I found the answer in the Wysiwyg profile (where you can configure Wysiwyg) and saw that the Editor CSS was set to "Use theme CSS". Evidently, there is a black background in the Zen-based open media theme.

So I switched it to "Editor default CSS" and it all seems to be working fine.

I spent awhile trying to figure this out. The answer was not intuitive - to me at least.