We've been brainstorming some ideas of projects that all the techie folks could work on over here...

"Mobcasting" tools for ingesting curating user-generated content:

Teamwear Football

Background: In 2008, NPR partnered with volunteer software developers and TechPresident.com to create VoteReport, which allowed users to submit reports on their voting experiences via tweets, text messages, voicemails and other content to a Google map. We did the same thing for the inauguration, also curating Flickr and YouTube videos using the tag inaug09. The problem is making projects like this happen on a regular basis. For example, if a PBS station wanted the public to send in reports on a massive political protest winding through town, there's no easy way to collect their user-generated content, curate it and visualize it in different ways.

Basic requirements: 

The system would allow a producer to...

1. Select which user-generated content platforms they wish to use for collecting UGC, such as Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, NPR API (if we set up a mechanism for UGC ingest)
2. Designate which tags/phrases will be used to trigger ingest frrom these platforms
3. Curate the UGC, including highlighting trusted users while blocking spam/untrusted users (could be done by producer or a distributed group of trusted volunteers)
4. Select from a variety of visualization mechanisms to display curated UGC, through the form of a customizable widget collection

Public Media Technology Database:

• This would be a simple web application that people could enter information about stations and shows and what technology they're using. For instance: Georgia Public Broadcasting may use Drupal, Twitter, Facebook, and run 4 blogs and by entering that information into a database, another station could come along and say "hey! I'm doing similar things, let's work together"... But that only works if there's a common and easy way to "compare notes".

You could also do some pretty cool visualizations of the data using Google APIs.

What's on Tonight mobile application:

• We could create an SMS system that would let people send a txt prompt and get back what programs are airing on their local PBS and NPR affiliates right then, or what's coming up next.
• Extension of idea: Choose what programs you like, get a text reminder five minutes before.

Micro-donation widget:

• Stations need to find new ways of raising money from their local communities, what if there was an easy to implement widget that they could market to their local users, users could put donation widgets on their blogs, Facebook pages, etc to collect small amounts of money.

Widget mashups of PBS and NPR Content:

• Wouldn't it be cool if PBS and NPR stations (and their communities) could create and grab widgets that mashup related content from both sources?

Activity Streams server:

• PBS has a prototyped application that lets various sources push "activity" data into a repository and republishes it. It'd be very cool to extend this and start creating applications that stations and shows could use to push activity. For example: "Jimmy just voted X NPR story 5-stars", or "Jill just left a comment on Y PBS blog." -- that content could then be pushed back to the user's social networks.

Facebook Application Generator:

• PBS has an application prototyped that lets you create Facebook applications in a matter of a few clicks, it's a reusable django app. Wouldn't it be neat if we could work together and create some applications that expose public media content to Facebook?

Crowdsourcing Transcripts

• The NPR API does not have transcripts for every program.
• The current transcript is not segmented by speaker, nor are the participants identified.
• How could everyday listeners participate?
• Inspiration: http://openmeetings.org/wiki/Main_Page

Google Wave bots and widgets for public media

• With the release of Google Wave, let's make sure public media is at the forefront of technology and build some apps!

Next Generation open-source station web site in a box

• Let's work together to create a framework that utilizes all free and open-source software (Django, Drupal, WordPress, etc) to build a highly customizable, templatable and easy-to-use next generation local station web site.

Add Google OpenSocial hooks to the Pinax Project

• Pinax is an open-source django project that could serve as a base for station or show websites, currently it doesn't interface directly with OpenSocial, that'd be a neat new technology to start using in public media.