MERCI

channelAustin is now testing MERCI's import feature and looking to expand its capabilities. We have a large database of equipment and want to minimize the amount of manual data entry required. Some basic information about MERCI's import feature is located in the Open Media Project handbook in the section on Equipment.

This is a discussion about what is the best approach in MERCI for dealing with Resources that comprise a number of additional Resources, Buckets, and/or Accessories, such as a Studio.

The Open Media Project Handbook section on MERCI defines 3 types of equipment available for checkout:

Resource - Individual items that are unique. Example: Studio A vs. Studio B

Bucket - Items that are identical or so similar that users don't care which one they get. Example: DV Cameras

Accessories - Items that you don't track other than to ensure that if someone takes one or more with other equipment, it is returned. Examples: Batteries, lens cap, usb cable.

I have a bunch of Qs across the spectrum of OMP issues, any help on any of them will be muchly appreciated

MERCI first:
Where and how does one add Accessories to MERCI? I'm talking about the Batteries that come up on as "Accessories for Testing" on the Inventory Content and Reservation pages - but aren't listed in the Inventory and don't appear to have an associated Node or content type. - I'd also want to add cables, adapters, etc. via this approach and input our actual batteries, with applicable stock IDs, is it worth doing this rather than just listing them in the inventory.

We started locking CCK fields that are referenced by TVframe so that stations could tell the difference between fields they've added and could edit and fields that would likely cause a problem if modified. Yesterday we had an issue where PCM needed to alter a setting in a locked filed, so I thought I'd post the instructions for unlocking fields for everyone. There might be other ways to do this, but I use phpmyadmin to access the locked column in the content_node_field table.

Just a quick reminder to everyone that there's going to be a great chance to talk with the folk who made it so drupal can run a community media center! Check out http://groups.drupal.org/node/23682 for more info.

Be there or be []

-pete

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.

Darrick from Davis Access Media submitted a patch for MERCI this week. I know PEGEvent is in Drupal's CVS and there a number of Drupal modules developed for MNN that have been distributed as code dumps, but never made it into CVS. As far as I can tell, no one outside of the original developers has contributed to these projects.

I'm curious if anyone else knows of a patch from one PEG location improving a module written by another PEG location?

As anyone who's created a project that utilizes Drupal's CVS knows, the process takes some effort... but once the project is created, the benefits of the issues queue, tacking updates, reviewing patches, etc outweigh the effort of getting the project started.

MERCI can now be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/merci

Our original plan was to include MNN's checkout in the Open Media Project. After evaluating their code and seeing where they were at with deploying it at MNN (still trying), we concluded that it was going to be too much work to update the code from 4.7 to 6, make the UI's easy enough for individual members to use (MNN is a staff run system), and convert dependencies on CiviCRM and a User Point budgeting based workflow into options.