Goal 1: Staffing.
Our first goal for the Deproduction / Denver Open Media project was to establish the development team. In June, we hired long-time contractor Brian Hiatt, as well as his partner/designer Sharee Dierringer, merging their Drupal development shop, Civic Pixel, into the Deproduction Family. We also posted our Developer Job Opening and with Brian at the helm, conducted a three-part interview process, and feel good about our top candidate. We hope to bring him on-board full-time by July 1.
We’re also lucky to have applied-for, and received, a CTC Vista, who will start on July 1 and will work full-time at DOM for at least 11 months. This team, combined with support from two frequent contractors and a part-time intern should represent an entirely new level of development capacity for the organization.
Goal 2: Reconnaissance.
Our second step is to ascertain and document the development already underway to be included in the suite of Drupal modules we hope to make available to the Public Access and CTC Community. We plan to catalog those efforts at groups.drupal.org/pegspace and will include the important work being done by MNN & OpenFlows, Vermont, Reno, and more.
Goal 3: Announce Beta-Grant Opportunity.
Our third goal for the summer is to release an application for Public Access stations or CTCs wanting to implement the beta-version of this tool-set and join Denver Open Media in testing and revising the tools througout 2009.
Just a quick note to all that this type of post is one of the reasons we created Idea Lab: So you can blog about your processes, problems or progress. Posts don’t always have to be long comments on the latest cool trends. A uniquely helpful thing you can do here for your Knight News Challenge colleagues, as well as anyone else working on digital projects, is to tell people what you think your challenges are and how you are going about solving them. Information about setbacks is particularly welcome. And if you have a problem that you don’t exactly know how to tackle, great. Talk about that here, and get others’ ideas.
As a longtime community media activist and PEG/broadband developer – my observation is that the DOM/Deproduction efforts that Tony has outlined are truly groundbreaking and potentially very important for the future of media access.
The collaborative processes involved are integral to future success!
We look forward to timely conversations and updates at ACM National conference in DC (July 9-12) and again at ACM West in Denver (October 24-25)!