Jonah Bossewitch’s summary of this month’s Big Apple Sprint is a great peek under the hood of what effective community-driven open-source development process looks like.
I also think that the substance is pretty compelling to nonprofit website builders, because it’s all about “that Web 2.0 stuff” like multimedia, tags, blogging and creative commons licensing.
Here’s the meaty part of Jonah’s summary:
Multimedia – focusing on improving the handling of multimedia content w/in Plone. Topics included transparent management of multiple media formats, improving the quicktime player, abstracting the common controls from the different media player formats, merging Austria’s ATVideo bittorrent branch, allowing for remote resources to be managed by the media types, and the integration of CCNMTL’s video clipping tool into PloneMultimedia. Thanks to Nate, Gary, Anna, Kurt, and Sky for making this group a productive success.
Discussions emerged around the hybridization of modern media formats. Is an audio track with synchronized gifs a piece of audio or video media?
A new ‘media’ container was introduced to PloneMultimedia allow for the mgmt of media that spans multiple traditional formats.
Annotations/Tagging – laying out the jigsaw puzzle that tagging, rdf, taxonomies, folksonomies, and sticky notes, and microapps have become in the hopes of consolidating on a common strategy to move forward. The Yucca project was born after we all began to realize how many of our problems would naturally fall into place with a robust engine which supports user contributed content annotations.
Also, work was done by Anders and Chad on the sticky notes product with the aim of factoring out the notes so they could be used outside of plone too (with the persistence abstracted, so that it could be backed by a microapp – like pita, or even stored client side), as well as improving the editability of the notes – they now support “double-click to edit”. Great job!
Blogging/Syndication – This group (Rob and Kurt) was primarily working on polishing quills so that it provides a smooth user experience. Progress continues and Quills is looking like a serious contender.
Content Licensing – see Nate’s post on conetent licensing in plone. This work was conducted primiarly by the group working in Utah, out of C()SL.
In case its not obvious, there was a great deal of overlap between the interests of the groups. For example, the multimedia team was also very interested in tagging, syndication ((p/v)odcasts), and licensing. Although it initially seemed challenging to tease the participants apart, the groups self organized quite organically.
The sprint was very productive, educational, and great fun as well. Beyond the technical achievements, relationships were forged that we expect to flourish in the months to come. I think we all witnessed tremendous convergence across our organizational requirements, and are also convinced that the tools we are working on will be in great demand once the corporate world figures out how useful these technologies can be.