open media project

The Open Media Foundation's last deliverable for the Open Media Project Knight Foundation grant is a shared content solution for the OMP partners. Our proposed solution differs from existing solutions in that we want to enable automated or user-driven content-sharing, as opposed to the admin-focused solutions that exist with PEGMedia or the ACM/Telvue solution... For example, we want a community member in San Fran, searching for "Cambodian Comedy" videos to see the matching files in SF, and also see a lower-tier of search results from other OMP partner sites.

I'm trying to deal w/ script "2_person_groups.sql" and I'm having a devil of a time getting through parts of this one (and I'm sure it'll happen again later on too).

I don't understand why there's a line CONCAT("Facil import: tblPerson.PersonID=", PersonID)   AS description, -- it seems to me that this pulls in a user ID number from a member and uses it as the group description. But that line makes sense in a subsequent script, so I think it might be an error due to copy and paste.

Also, the script doesn't work, at least for me at Boston.

raSANTIAGO's scripts for importing data into CiviCRM from original Facil data are working very well. (See: http://groups.drupal.org/node/23535) So far, I've only had to make a few modifications to the code. Especially pleased with the scripts for pulling Facil's Class data into CiviCRM's Event tables. raSANTIAGO developed these scripts for Portland Community Media and released them as open source code available to anyone in the Public Access community involved with migrating away from Facil to an open source database environment (particularly MySQL).

Notes from CONFERENCE CALL on ACM Server Standards
By Stefan Wray
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
10:30 AM CST

CALL PARTICIPANTS

HELEN SOULE, Executive Director, Alliance for Community Media
RICH DESIMONE, ACM Standards Working Group, Chair
JESSE LERMAN, Telvue & ACM Standards Working Group
KEVIN REYNEN, Denver Open Media, CivicPixel, & Open Media Project
STEFAN WRAY, channelAustin & Open Media Project
KATE GORMAN, UPTV & Open Media Project

CALL SUMMARY

Pete P-O presented on the Open Media toolset during the last meet-up, and we've finally settled on a date for a meet-and-greet for anyone who wants to learn more about the project or get involved. The Open Media Project partners and raSANTIAGO are hosting the social at 3:30 p.m.

channelAustin is seeking help to properly set up exim4, postfix, or even sendmail on its web server for purposes of having email function properly for its Drupal installation. We have a Sun Server in-house with Ubuntu, Drupal, and CiviCRM. Our ISP is Grande Communications (but that will be changing soon (this week even)). And our mail server is handled pro bono by Primus Networks here in Austin.

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?

We could use some help to set up mail on our Ubuntu server. It's been recommended that we set up POSIX, although it's not clear that this is absolutely essential. The Ubuntu server has Drupal and CiviCRM. The main purposes for mail right now is for users getting password confirmations, for people to send us mail through the contact form, and eventually for sending users other types of notifications. We have CiviCRM but are using Constant Contact right now. We may switch to using CiviMail. So we may increase the way we use mail on the server in the future.

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.

As we near the completion of year-1 of the Open Media Project, I thought it might be useful to provide a brief history so-far. Part of my agreement in winning the Knight News Challenge grant that made the Open Media Project possible was to post frequent updates to the PBS Idealab Blog. Looking back, those entries provide a good timeline of year-1, and a look forward at year 2.

You can see all 10 entries at http://www.pbs.org/idealab/tony_shawcross_1/