I’m headed to the CPB today for an all-day meeting tomorrow (Thu, Apr 15) at the mother ship, hosted and arranged by Rob Bole (aka @rbole).
Up for discussion amongst a small group of public media tech types? Collaboration and community, or at least that’s what I’m expecting.
Many of you can probably list conference after conference and presentation after presentation, especially in the digital media space, where we all swear to stay in touch and share project ideas and methods, but it just never seems to happen. And I’m as guilty as the rest!
Lots of smaller projects have popped up over the years, including the #pubmedia chats happening each Monday evening with the help of some public media Twitter luminaries. 😉
What each of the projects have lacked is either staying power or depth of collaboration, mostly driven by a lack of time to pursue collaborative work instead of individual (station-focused) digital production.
With the help of Allen Gunn, I’m betting on a great meeting and some sustainable work to benefit our communities and colleagues across the public radio, TV and web universe. Hopefully there will be more to report by the weekend.
Gravity Medium 
Hi John,
What’s funny (and by that I mean sad) about the pubmedia collaborations I’ve participated in or seen is they don’t connect with each other. On other cases they have their thunder stolen by projects like COVE or the new Public Media Platform or whatever it’s to be called. (I have more to say on those particular projects another time.) It’s hard enough keeping a loose group of overworked pubmedia people in touch over time, and then there’s the challenge of connecting one group to another. So they’re built on informal relationships, which is often great, but if a key person drops out for whatever reason things can fall apart. Also, we don’t even have a comprehensive contact list of public media tech people, so it’s impossible to even survey what’s happening, what people are trying to do, what they need to do it, and how we can better work together.
Still, I keep hoping that we can build on projects as they emerge, and eventually reach a tipping point toward viability. The #pubmedia thing provides another good possibility.
I know that Rob Bole is interested in helping to form a better pubmedia community, especially among new media practitioners. There may even be funding to come for an “evangelist” role in the system to keep at least the digital people connected. As you know, there have been many small, disconnected efforts like this for years now. The theory here is that we need something professionally developed and hosted on an ongoing basis.