Ben Sheldon, CTC Vista Project/Digital Bicycle, talks about Mapping Access and the evolving community media landscape. From the website:
“MappingAccess.com is a tool for acknowledging the ubiquity of Access Television and providing a means for stations to better work together. Awareness of one another is the first step.
In order to provide such a powerful tool freely and accessibly, MappingAccess.com is designed to empower stations to submit and maintain information about themselves. By self-empowering the MappingAccess.com’s users, our developers can best develop and improve the tools themselves.”
Produced by Colin Rhinesmith.
This video was originally shared on blip.tv by cmediachange with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Great interview! I really think MappingAccess is one of the best examples of how existing technologies (Drupal, Google Maps) can be used to start turning the highly decentralized PEG Access world (3000 – 5000 independent stations!) into a more collaborative, networked organism.
One thing that I don’t think was mentioned though was how quickly Ben was able to put together the first iteration of MappingAccess. It went from being talked about to being something we could play with in just a handful of days. This is partly because Ben’s a hell of a developer but also because the barrier to entry on these things is getting lower every month.