media

In May, Sun Microsystems approached us for assistance in launching a very cool social media site they were building in Drupal. Two months later we launched the Sun Video Learning Exchange, designed to let Sun staff easily publish training videos and resources to their global network of support engineers and customers. From the time of project kick off we had two months to complete two design passes, develop all features, test, and launch the site. Work progressed smoothly much in part to a very agile work process that paired our team with internal Sun developers working side by side to launch the site.

The site is a great showcase of the comprehensive media handling functionality available now in Drupal. Apart from the integration with LimeWire to store and transcode content and integration with Sun’s LDAP directory for authentication, the site is built entirely with very standard Drupal modules including Views, FiveStar, and Community Tags. It was a real pleasure for us to work with Sun to develop the Learning Exchange and we are really looking forward to seeing what else they can do with Drupal.

This morning an interview with Jay Rosen about his (and our) NewAssignment.Net project was posted on Slashdot. For anyone following the link here in question #3, Welcome!

Feel free to leave us a comment or question. I’ll be watching the /. thread as well.

One of the projects we’re most excited about at Chapter Three is called NewAssignment.Net (“NAN” for short). We’re going to run this as the premiere of our Open Practice model. If you’re interested in following or participating in this project, contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

NewAssignment.Net is an ambitious and potentially groundbreaking venture headed up by Jay Rosen, professor of Journalism at NYU and a respected presence in the blogosphere (www.pressthink.org). The goal is to develop a successful model for open-source investigative journalism.

I’m personally very excited to be working with Uncle Jay (why try and hide it: he’s related to Zack), and to be taking such a bold step into an arena — the function of the Press in a 21st Century Democracy — that’s near and dear to my own heart.

For an overview on how the project will be run, and for answers to frequent/obvious questions like “how do you prevent cranks from ruining everything?” and “are you guys just massive sell-outs?” I refer you to the horse’s mouth.

Suffice to say, I think Jay’s got what it takes to make this work:

• He’s got real experience and connections in both the old and new (print/internet) worlds of the Press.
• He has a great vision for where this can go and how it can spread, and isn’t afraid of people stealing his ideas.
• He’s willing (enthusiastic even) to run the project in a radically open fashion. How open is radical? We’re going to let you all look at our budget more or less in real-time. Oh man.

And of course last but not least he’s got the brain trust from Chapter Three LLC in his corner, which we like to think helps. It’s going to be fun.

In upcoming posts, I’ll give some back-story about the idea, and talk in-depth about some open-source and techincal aspects of how it will work, and also about our Open Practice development process.

Stay tuned to the blog here, or to the NewAssignment.net project page for updates.