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Army of Geeks

By Margaret Rosas

As communications change and the demand grows for local networks, our mission becomes clear: we are being called upon to organize an army of geeks to accomplish the tasks that lie ahead.

The Background

Joaquin Alvarado presented the plan for National Public Lightpath to public broadcasters at the Integrated Media Association conference last week in Atlanta. He called on the public media audience to actively build partnerships in their local communities and apply for economic stimulus grant money to make the network a reality. This is a common goal to be shared by NPR, PBS, CPB and all the stations.

Doc Searls followed on with a blog post that expands Leonard Witts vision to turn PBS into a news powerhouse. Robert Patterson took these points and drafted an emerging plan to make this a reality.

Key points in Patterson's plan were to lower costs systemically and yet attract resources beyond money - in particular technology resources. I believe this point hinges on two key actions:

1) Wide adoption of Drupal open source platform
2) Call to arms to rally geek talent at the local level

Adoption of Drupal Open Source Platform

With the super-high-speed network in place, one of the key requirements will be a software platform that can support the various organizations connecting to the network and distributing content. This is an opportune moment for the whole system to adopt a common, open source platform.

A survey conducted last fall by PubForge (a collective of public media web developers), concluded that the allocation of resources to web development and maintenance is critically low. Recent cutbacks due to the economic climate don't make that picture look any brighter. This is why adoption of a shared platform is so critical. A shared platform will allow open access to developers to both share common code and also extend the platform to create custom applications for their communities.

Open source platforms have a lower acquisition cost and offer a global development team via the open source community. Drupal is a platform that has gained the support of many public media stations and is used widely by non-profits. In fact, Obama recently launched Recovery.gov on the Drupal platform.

Rally Local Geek Talent

We should advocate for a national call to action among the geek communities of America. Public media stations have long rallied volunteer staff to work in service of their stations. The call to service should be made to geeks to come to the aid of a public service Internet. This should be done in coordination with a national effort to develop a shared platform that could be used throughout the system.

The amount of work needed to digitize our nation's history, create public participatory systems, and to create an information network is not by any means a trivial task. It will take an army of geeks. The first two rounds of Internet innovation (web 1.0 and web 2.0) have created a distributed network of talent across the country. This network is currently connected through popular social media tools and they meet in real life at local meet-ups and geek gatherings. There are a growing number of coworking innovation centers around the country that also serve as a geek commons.

Public media needs to invite them to build the public commons envisioned by Natural Public Lightpath. It starts with one person sparking the conversation. Today I will be inviting my local community of Santa Cruz geeks to join the cause to come build the public commons for our community.

RadioEngage will be part of that environment, but only one part of a network of systems and applications. These systems will interact yet not be dependent on one another. We will build applications that allow us to have a fuller, richer life in our communities. We will build applications deemed necessary by the communities, we will provide training to our fellow community members in aid of the system. This will develop a more skilled workforce and provide opportunities for economic stimulus in our own communities.

The advancement of open source tools and server platforms has created the right opportunity to adopt open source en masse and build upon it a national infrastructure that is independent yet interconnected. This means building a common storage archive (American Archive) with an API that provides access. The next step is to build applications that allow the display and mash up of this information in a multitude of ways with a multitude of devices.

It would extend to be used in the schools, non-profits and government organizations. Public media has the opportunity to serve as a job training ground if the correct structure were to be put in place.

We put a man on the moon nearly 40 years ago (July 21, 1969), so today I ask can we rise to the challenge before us to create the National Public Lightpath and the associated geek army critical for its success?

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).