Unfortunately, I was sick this past weekend and couldn’t make it to our Boston Action Tank workshop, “Strategies for Shaping the Media/Tech Future: Policy, Funding & Organizing,” at the Grassroots Use of Technology conference in Lowell, MA.  However, I am looking forward to presenting at the Alliance for Community Media conference in D.C. next week with Ivettza Sanchez of Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

Ivettza and I are running the “Training the Trainers: Vlogging 101″ workshop on Thursday, July 10 from 1:30-3:00PM. Here’s the description from the conference brochure:

“Vlogging (AKA Video Blogging) is a short form of video strictly created to upload to the Internet. This workshop will equip you with the tools and materials you’ll need to teach videoblogging back at your CMC. It will also provide you with tips on how to help your producers navigate the myriad of ways to get their videos watched on the web from videoblogs to wikipedia, to social networking sites.”

If you’re coming to the conference next week, I look forward to seeing you there.

Jason Daniels from Medfield Community Cable Access posted notes from the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region Conference on “Migrating to a CMS.”

“The goal of this session is to get an Access center in the right frame of mind to begin the process of moving their website from a static html site to a dynamic (open source) content management system.

Below are the presentation handouts from ‘Migrating to a CMS’. Feel free to download and share. I would like to thank those that attended the session. If you have any additional questions and want to keep this dialog going email me at jdaniels (AT) medfield.tv.”

Visit Medfield.tv for additional links to content management systems.

For those interested in learning more about the intersection of Public Access Television and free and open source software, Jason Daniels (medfield.tv) forwarded along a link to audio & meeting minutes from a gathering of public broadcasting and public access media folks during the recent Drupal conference held in Boston, this year. Here’s a bit from the description:

“This is the breakout discussion held during the Drupalcon 2008 Boston conference on March 5, 2008. This discussion tracks the progress of anumber of concurrent Drupal development projects focusing on enabling PEG (public, educational and government) Access centers to utilize Drupal for their organization.

The video was not so good, so we just have the audio. Below are some notes from the conversation. Hopefully, this provides some context, history and direction for those in the Access community who are wondering what Drupal is, why it is something they should care about and also for those in the Drupal community who would like to know about a very exciting project. Please add, clarify or correct.”

Thanks, Jason.

For another perspective from the community media and technology community on open source software, visit MediaMix.

The Texas Community Media Summit is taking place on March 1 this year at UT at Austin. The website explains that the Summit will take place with the purpose of:

• “Understanding and knowledge of the Texas community media landscape
• Inclusion of ethnic, social and cultural diversity in community media
• Collaboration and partnerships among Texas community media
• Cohesive political focus aimed at influencing state / federal media policy”

The website (built on Drupal) caught my attention because of how the content in the left sidebar is laid out. After the list the contents, including overview, summit agenda and other details, the site provides a list of TX community television stations followed by a list of TX vloggers, and TX community and free radio stations. It is great to see community television stations and vloggers highlighted next to each other within the context of community media in TX.

The website also has a link to the four-part documentary from the 2007 Chicago Community Media Summit that, as the site explains, “examine the voices, the content, best examples and practices, and the potential of community media to serve basic human and community needs.”