Integrated Media Association 2007

Just got off the phone with Seth Gotlieb (formerly of optaros.com, now at contenthere.net ) he had presented at IMA2007 as part of the discussion on choosing a cms.

Seth had some great advice that helped me form my thinking about how I should proceed as a technologist as well as how the folks rallying together at pubforge.org might best proceed as a group.

As someone who has built a good part of a station site using a particular brand of open source technologies (let’s say, I’ve chosen to drive our station around in the open source equivalent of a Ford), I will be facing a decision, given that there seems to be some considerable intertia in the Chevy camp. But now may not be the time to jump from one moving car to another, at least not yet.

Seth suggested that some good first steps would be for us to:

• Identify group of stations (or individuals) who are willing to work together around a specific (technology) or goal.
• Arrange for a week-long training session for the group in a single physical location. Either decide which city you would like to hold this as a group, or decide the city based on where the training is being held. (For plone users, he suggested contacting Joel Burton about a Plone Bootcamp — for drupal users, he suggested talking with Jeff Robbins at lullabot.com).

He went on to say that the benefit of getting together in the same place would:

• be an indicator of commitment - those who would be willing to travel would be more invested
• Getting out of the office would allow us to focus better
• It would be an opportunity to forge bonds socially and increase networking opportunities

He suggested we identify which projects are currently in development (such as the drupal stations modules project, or find/start a broadcasting equivalent to the ploneforartists project). He suggested we identify which aspects of these projects we would like to see improved or added upon. He suggested that we could add an economy of scale by either collaborating on code as a group, or by pooling our cash to pay for additions to the codebase.

He suggested that we check into the pricepoints for training. If we have x number of participants, what will it cost us?

He suggested, in looking for people who would be willing to attend the training, that we should start with the folks who initially put the module together, for instance the drupal station modules were originally designed for KPSU, a college radio station in Portland, Oregon. Maybe this station would be a good place to start with a partnership, and then look outward from there.

I guess that leads to the question, is there a listing of folks from the latest IMA conference who were interested in using Drupal, Plone or alfresco (or perhaps frameworks such as jboss or ruby, or django — or even closed source cms’ like Jack Brighton’s work with expression engine) the list goes on? Do you think such a list should be put together at pubforge.org?

To get a better idea how these discussions might be beneficial to Seth in his work, I asked “what was in it for him?” He replied that he wanted to keep tabs on the progress of these initiatives, that he would be interested in helping us form an organization, for helping us decide how such an entity would be structured, and how we are going to go about making decisions. His emphasis is in identifying the requirements for a product, in product selection, in enabling developers to work together and enabling companies work together using collaborative techniques / open source tools. Perhaps we’ll draw on his expertise again further down the road?

I’d like to echo Dale’s posting, and expand upon it just a bit more.

First off, I agree that the political hurdles to implementing a standardized and centralized media back-end for the public media world are daunting. Further, I think what we see as “public media” is going to shift around rapidly in next couple of years, so determining who is “allowed” into the fold will becoming increasingly difficult (e.g. can a library join, or do you have to be a broadcaster with an active high-power FM or TV license?). There are other challenges as well, but let’s leave that issue alone for the moment. Back to the tech…

I think a centralized storage system is probably a bad idea, or at least one that would be difficult to achieve for all kinds of reasons. It’s also unnecessary. Why does everything have to be stored together, under one roof? The storage can be anywhere. It’s the live, searchable content index that would be most useful to the public, to other stations, to search engines and more. Let’s just remember that storage and indexing do not have to occur at the same place.

Now, about RSS. I think RSS is a great syndication system for short-form and linked media for recently published items. But RSS strikes me as insufficient as a deep-catalog syndication system. For example, how would I syndicate — using RSS — a catalog of 50,000 items or 100,00 items, in which the items are drawn from a variety of subjects and media formats and sources, each with various rights and authors associated with them? Theoretically, RSS could do this, as it’s just a string of XML. However, RSS 2.0 in its baseline configuration doesn’t carry all the data a centralized search system would need. Sure you can extend RSS with your own additional XML tags (just look at iTunes), but it still sounds a little silly to me to do it that way.

What I would propose is the establishment of a standard metadata description and storage pointer language, based on the PBCore schema (which is pretty complete already). Each public media entity would then expose its metadata index and its digital media archive to the public, to other stations, and to a centralized repository that would periodically accept updates from the edge storage and indexing systems. Access to the data could be tiered as desired, exposing only those items you wish to expose to various users or partners.

Using this metadata standard would allow the proposed central index to gather information from repositories both inside and outside the public media world.

In this way, we have the local control required (for whatever reasons) over media assets, yet the central searchability of our content is not impaired. Local entities would be required to meet certain metadata standards (and tests) before being accepted into the central indexing system. And getting into the system would be a high priority for any media companies wanting to be “found” online, especially in areas beyond the reach of any legacy transmitters.

The big plus is that while there would have to be an entity building and maintaining the indexing service, the various players would only have to meet a baseline standard protocol, mostly eliminating the politics. Yes, fights break out at the IEEE from time to time, but in the end, they do reach broadly interoperable standards.

Or… and here’s a subversive bit… do we just implement the metadata standard and then call up Google and tell them how and where to index all our content?

Great conference as usual, and more to digest than can be done at one sitting. I’d like to chime in on the metaconversation that has run through the last three conferences on the possibility and desirability of a unified platform for public broadcasting. I am one of those who feel that such a move is both impossible and undesirable.

Impossible for a number of reasons; here are a few:

1. Too broad a variety of players with too diverse a set of needs and too great a disparity of resources and capabilities.
2. Too decentralized an organizational structure for there to be a central authority to mandate and enforce adoption of a non-binding resolution, let alone a content management system and accompanying business model.
3. If one could reach agreement on a unified approach, that process, plus the infrastructure development and deployment process would likely take so long that the final result would be already obsolete on rollout.

And it would be undesirable for a number of reasons; here are a few:

1. It would build inflexibility into the system–the platform would have to be renogotiated and reinvented every time a technological surprise comes along.
2. It would enforce a least common demoninator set of features
3. It would discourage the lively development of new media literacy and expertise at the station and producer levels.
4. Where unified platforms exist, as at cbc.ca, the region level (or station-level in the US model) almost disappears. I recall from 2 years ago that CBC presented numbers showing that 95% of traffic went to the national level, while the 16 region sites split the remaining 5%. While this may be less important in a centrally funded service, it would be a killer in a system like ours where most revenue in the system is derived from the station.org level.

The question then becomes, how do we gain for the system the benefits that could come from a centralized platform, without actually having to build one. I propose that we take the focus off how stations and other entities get content into their websites, and put the focus on how to get content out of their websites, i.e. syndication.

I think this is a more fruitful approach because it bypasses the steep hurdles presented by organizational politics, and also because it would be be a necessary process even if we were to create a common platform. The obvious candidate is RSS syndication, since it is already widely understood and adopted. Most of the platforms used for citizen journalism and UGC already have some RSS capability and provide features that can put organizations of very limited technical capability into the game. A wide variety of the content management systems developed or adopted by stations for site management can already use RSS, or could be tweaked to produce RSS for small investments.

Once at the point where all (or at least most) stations can export their content in a common form, exploiting, aggregating and monetizing the result becomes a task divorced from how the content was created. It seems that this is a place where a more centralized approach becomes both practical and desirable.

As a model, I point to the NPR podcast project, which brings in content from a truly wide variety of sources with varying capabilities, and bundles it with national branding, national underwriting, traffic reporting and revenue sharing, and can still accomodate a regional underwriter segment, and doesn’t prevent producers from also distributing the same core content via their own station.org or program.org addresses. With a limited investment in export standards, a similar portal-style approach could be applied to the whole of the system’s output without having to pry station’s longstanding approaches to the web from their cold, dead hands.