My thoughts on the Alliance for Community Media Conference - Western Region, Denver Colorado

After a little time to reflect, here's my thoughts on the recent ACM West conference (thanks to all the work of Ann Theis!):

• There is a divide between those of us who have chosen to "drink the Drupal Koolaid", and those who are just starting to look into new solutions and need to understand how we came to our decision. At this point I think projects like the Open Media Project (http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project) do take a leap of faith, but that as we start implementing at the beta sites we need to make sure we document our decisions and the process to help legitimize the decision for other stations down the road.
• Many stations are now working with Drupal, and are looking for resources to help them take next steps. Local user groups are a great resource for this, but there were several requests for an intermediate / advanced, PEG workflow centric Drupal / open source software conference..
• The vision of PEG 2.0 was an excellent session, that brought up numerous issues for me. The most significant being that I don't feel like there is enough focus on insuring the distribution channels are effective. By that, I mean branded and presented in a way that is seen as relatively legitimate in the community -- in our city, when I mention 'public access' many (if not the majority) think 'freaks'. I think it's critical that our channels and the space we are building online be seen at least as legitimate as Youtube... Blip.. etc, otherwise we're not really helping people get their messages out effectively. This also requires surveying, and taking advantage of the metrics that become available as we move online...
• At every one of these conferences, I always meet a few new people working in the PEG developer / Drupal / Open Source sphere. It would be really great if we can all start communicating on a more frequent basis over the drupal groups, a mailing list, etc...
• The Qtool, while exciting when you have access to a laptop, is extremely frustrating when you don't. My laptop died during one presentation, and suddenly I felt more excluded from the discussion than I would have if the Qtool had not been in use at all.
• There are soo many different PEG technology/open source projects being developed at the moment, but very few (if any) that are being deployed at more than a handful of stations. There is a lot of curiosity tempered with fear over these solutions as they stand now. This hesitation is justified and anyone who wants to be an early adopter of any of these early projects should understand the concept of beta -- and be willing to invest time and energy towards making the tools work for their particular situation. Anyone who can meet this criteria should participate however, as until we get to a generic solution that can be embraced by the larger community we will continue to lose the benefits of collaboration that are necessary to sustain these projects over time. After seeing the excitement and investment in this conference, I'm confident we'll be much closer to this goal by the next big PEG conference!