Blogs

While attending DrupalCon in Washington, DC, Margaret was interviewed by Kent Bye from Lullabot about the project.  The interview provides an overview on the scope of the project and some perspective about the challenges of bringing Drupal into public media stations.

We've compiled a list of the initial modules for the Radio Engage distribution. We would love to have community input on this set of modules.

Please leave your comments below. We'll be updating this list and also providing more documentation to explain their use and configuration in the coming weeks

Radio Engage has been an amazing journey. As we watch the project unfold, morph and define itself, we are discovering that our goal is to create more than a turn-key Drupal CMS for public radio stations, it's to teach our community how to embrace new technologies. We want to start a conversation platform where local news can be discussed, shared and disseminated.

This is a huge job. And it's taken us these last 6+ months to figure out how to approach this task. Our team has:

• Gone to countless meetings, conferences, bar camps, salons, and events to educate ourselves about public media
• We've talked, we've planned, we've charted, and we've disassembled and reassembled KUSP's current website to accommodate the changes Radio Engage will bring
• We've networked with the KUSP Board of Directors, Staff and Community Advisory Boards
• And finally, we've strategized how to deal with the resistance that our project has sometimes met within the community

Because for our project to succeed, we need the community's buy-in. It's coming slowly but surely. Public Media Camp, which we held in November, was a turning point. We realize now that our task is to work with the community, training is crucial if Radio Engage is going to succeed in its' goal of giving the Santa Cruz community a new, richer way to obtain local news.

There's an Albert Einstein quote I feel particularly affectionate for:

"We cannot solve problems with the same way of thinking we used when we created them."

Public media is facing a problem. The necessity of change is dawning on everyone involved. How we deal with change is personal.

The problem is this: local public media was a trusted, reliable information source for a generation. In a world where the way we consume information has totally changed, how do we pass on the tradition?

Margaret kicks off the blogging on IdeaLab with an overview of the project to date.