channelAustin

Here is a link to video of a session at the Community Media Drupal Summit http://vimeo.com/40106985

http://vimeo.com/40048644

Presentation by Elizabeth Raley, Project Manager and Certified ScrumMaster, CivicActions, at the Community Media Drupal Summit in Austin, Texas on March 9, 2012.

In Austin, Texas, on March 8 and 9, 2012, Executive Directors and staff from Access Humboldt, Amherst Media, channelAustin, Easton Community Access Television, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Philadelphia Community Access Media, Regional Educational Technology Network, and St.

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.

Two weeks ago I attended the Open Media Camp in Denver, organized by Denver Open Media. I was representing channelAustin. There are 7 community media centers / stations now part of a network that are collaborating to develop and implement open source tools. One thing we talked about was the need for open standards for video metadata. We want to work with the Open Web Foundation, and are asking them to help create a framework and process for developing open standards for video metadata. It's bit a complicated and is explained here: Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal. If anyone here in Austin is interested in this, or any other aspect of the Open Media Project, please contact me.

I've posted a Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal to the Open Media Project drupal group. This may be of interest to some on this group.

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.

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.

I'm starting a new thread on Creative Commons that picks up on these comments:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68554
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68578
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68596
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68738

There are several factors to consider in transitioning to using Creative Commons licensing:

1) Current actual practice & historical practice
2) Current policies and procedures
3) Current cablecast contract

channelAustin is pleased to announce it has recently been chosen by Denver Open Media and Civic Pixel as one of 6 public access television / community media centers in the country for a Beta site implementation of their Open Media Project modules. http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project

channelAustin, http://www.channelaustin.org, is looking for Austin Drupal and CiviCRM developers to join us in this amazing project that will help us integrate the interactive features of the web.

channelAustin is Austin's community TV station located in East Austin at 1143 Northwestern Avenue.