January 08, 2010 Archives

2010-01-08 12:44:50

A New Project

It might be thought that Erie Looking Productions only acts in the library world. It might be thought that Erie Looking Productions only handles a single program and nothing else. It might be thought that Erie Looking Productions cannot break out of the LIS cloister.

Wrong!

Erie Looking Productions is acting as media partner for a project that has nothing at all to do with librarianship. Using what is known about dealing with librarians, the air staff is assisting a joint marketing effort between the NGO and Ohio community teams of the Ubuntu project. The NGO team is attempting to reach out to non-governmental organizations like the red crosses and crescents and other to get them to adopt Ubuntu. The Ohio community team is needing practice with members producing their own audio so that an Ohio team podcast could be released that would help strengthening bonds between geographically dispersed team members. Erie Looking Productions is here to help tie the effort together so that something akin to the multimedia marketing output relative to the Bowflex exercise equipment can be created.

Right now we will be using Launchpad to develop the scripting for this. This allows for collaborative coding already for software projects. In lieu of changing text files containing programming code, we will be working with OpenOffice.org Writer files to deal with scripts. The version control system in use for this will be bzr.

What's intended as the end product? The joint marketing effort is intended to create an audio program that presents Ubuntu's usefulness from a functional point of view rather than spewing stats. This would be focused on reaching out to those who are specialists in their own field but not necessarily computer specialists.

This is looking to be an exciting project that might also allow for great collaborative opportunities. At least one paper (or at least a research note) could be written about this relative to using Launchpad & bzr for collaborative new media production. Other tools like Basecamp, Citadel, Zimbra, Lotus Notes, and the like do exist. Since Launchpad is used for development mainly within the Ubuntu project, we will be sticking with what possible contributors are already using.

As for a release date, such is not firmly stapled down yet...


Posted by Stephen Michael Kellat | Permanent Link