MediaGoblin 0.4.1 (bugfix release)

We've pushed out a bugfix release closely following 0.4.0: Hall of the Archivist. This is a bugfix... those running 0.4.0 are encouraged to switch over to take advantage of several fixes:

If you were surprised to find out that the docs support wasn't converting your documents, that's likely due to a bug which has just been fixed which had an error in the way it was calling LibreOffice.
MediaGoblin was updated to better work with some recent dependency changes.

That's it! As always, see the release notes!

MediaGoblin 0.4.0: Hall of the Archivist

MediaGoblin 0.4.0: Hall of the Archivist banner

MediaGoblin's newest release is here, 0.4.0! We've got a whole lot of cool things, most excitingly document support and an improved plugin infrastructure. Now more than ever before MediaGoblin has the tooling to become a real library of knowledge. Sounds exciting? Read on!

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother being shown in MediaGoblin

First of all, let's talk about document support. Coded by MediaGoblin contributor and user Alon Levy, this new media type is pretty awesome: it uses the hyper-awesome pdf.js to display documents in the browser.

What kind of documents? Well, not just PDFs... if your server has LibreOffice installed it can convert most document types LibreOffice can read. (And yes, both the original document and the PDF will be available for download!) From ebooks to journal articles to conference presentations, MediaGoblin can show it all.

We've got a new plugin system! Almost anything is possible now in our new system, and indeed, much of our summer projects will be relying on this new infrastructure.

Interested in working on a plugin? Check our plugin writing docs, and if you need new hooks added, please don't hesitate to talk to us.

A nice new feature: we now have human readable timestamps! Instead of just saying the date and time, it tells you how long ago they were taken. However, it's easy enough to still see the date and time something was uploaded; just hover over it! Additionally, if a photo has metadata about when it was taken, that can be displayed in addition to the time it was uploaded. Pretty cool, yeah?

There's a good number of other features worth mentioning briefly: you can configure whether or not you want to allow comments in your config now, and we have an experimental Piwigo compatible API plugin. (Very experimental, but some people have managed to get photo uploading with Shotwell!) And, as always, there are many, many under the hood improvements.

So what's coming up? Now that our plugin API is more refined, expect to see more cool plugins coming up in the future. And most excitingly, we've got six full time interns this summer from Google Summer of Code / GNOME Outreach Program for Women who are working on some awesome projects this summer. The plan was that once plugin infrastructure wrapped up that we'd move on to federation work, and indeed this is moving forward with Jessica Tallon's work to add support for the Pump API to MediaGoblin. So we've got a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon!

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible: Aditi Mittal, Aeva Ntsc, Alon Levy, Brett Smith, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, David Thompson, Duncan Patterson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Gabi Thume, Gabriel Saldana, Hans Lo, Jessica T, Joar Wandborg, Mats Sjöberg, Mike Linksvayer, Nathan Yergler, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Praveen Kumar, Rodney Ewing, Sam Tuke, Sebastian Spaeth, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, and Tryggvi Björgvinsson! You all rock. MediaGoblin couldn't happen without the hard work of people like you!

This was a jam-packed release, and we couldn't mention everything, so be sure as always to check out the release notes, especially if you're upgrading. Now get out there and have some fun goblin'ing it up... and if you want to join our quest to improve the sharing of knowledge and spreading user freedom across the net, we'd love to have you!

On Prism

News of PRISM is spreading rapidly, and with realization of just how serious this is. This isn't the first time that there's been the revelation of government spying, but more than ever we're seeing clearly how broad and wide government and corporate surveillance are growing over our lives.

Meanwhile, the trend in computing is to put more and more of your data under the control of a handful of megacorporations, which makes total surveillance of your communications easier than ever before. But people feel trapped. What kind of alternative do they have?

Well, if you're wondering if there's an alternative to Facebook and Google Plus to share your photos, we're working on it:

In addition to building quality, freedom-respecting tools that people can run themselves, we've begun work to make federation really happen so servers can hook together in a pleasant, seamless matter, with privacy work to come after. If you want to help fund an alternative to these systems, we can use your help, so consider donating if you can. Every bit helps.

we love you Donate...

There's also more you can do besides donating:

Run a MediaGoblin instance for your family and friends. This is maybe the most important thing we could use more of: engaged users of the software.
Join our community, set up a local instance, and help contribute. We can use all kinds of contributions: documentation, code, translations, graphic design, testing and bug reporting...
Help similar projects and run and use that software. Run your own mail and XMPP server (we like Prosody), run a pump.io instance, or use a friend's server, or switch to an organization that you can trust like RiseUp to do that hosting for you. Don't trust services like Gmail! Update: see also the excellent Prism Break site for a list of free alternatives.

Our liberties are under more threat than ever before, and the internet needs your help to keep it free. Help support user autonomy and freedom on the net!

Between OPW and GSoC, 2013 Will Be a Summer of Awesome

Earlier I wrote about how this year we are participating in Google Summer of Code and GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Well, we just got announced all the students we're accepting. It's quite a few in quite a few awesome areas! In alphabetical order:

Aditi Mittal (mentored by Sebastian Spaeth) will be building a new media type for... blogging! By doing blogging as a media type we should be able to compete with media/blogging hybrid systems like Tumblr without compromising on MediaGoblin's core design.

Emily O'Leary (mentored by me, Christopher Allan Webber) will be improving our test suite and helping with bug triage.

Jessica Tallon (mentored by Joar Wandborg) will be building... that's right!... federation support for MediaGoblin through the Pump API.

Jessica has a rare hyper-qualification for this, already working on a PyPump library. We're already talking about various improvements to that library's API to make it fit well into MediaGoblin and to ease federation for other systems too!

Natalie Foust-Pilcher (mentored by Aeva Palecek through Outreach Program for Women) will be working on building us an awesome new administrative interface!

Praveen Kumar (mentored by me, Christopher Allan Webber) will be adding a search interface to MediaGoblin! A long running request!

Rodney Ewing (mentored by Aaron Williamson) will be working on making our user authentication system super flexible and pluginified with multiple new backends! He's already making great progress!

The main problem we had this year is that (and really, I do mean this) we had so many awesome applications this year that picking between them was very tough. And I can say this with some experience: I've done mentoring for Summer of the Code in the past and I can say that I've never seen so many amazing proposals at once.

One thing's for sure though: this summer is going to be awesome. Go go goblins!

MediaGoblin joins GNOME Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code 2013

I'm extremely proud to announce that MediaGoblin is in for a summer of awesome... we're participating in both GSOC 2013 (under the GNU umbrella) and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women 2013! (Yes, you might notice we're not a GNOME project, but the super awesome people at GNOME have extended the program to other free software projects.) Are you a student looking for a summer job contributing to free software? Or maybe you are a woman interested in contributing to free software, something like MediaGoblin maybe? Then you should apply! (Maybe you are both... we encourage you to apply to both programs then, actually!)

I think these programs are incredibly important to helping newcomers get involved in free software. And I am especially a supporter of the Outreach Program for Women. I have a number of friends who are women who I deeply admire for their contributions to free software and are people who came in through that program. We're seeing increasing success in growing diversity in free software, and I think this matters.

We decided to apply for a mentoring organization for OPW at last minute. Unlike GSOC where there's funding that comes as part of the project, funding doesn't necessarily come with OPW participation. We haven't found external funding, so we're at present planning on this money to come out of the MediaGoblin campaign fund. Since that fund mostly goes to support my own salary, in a sense, this is a personal hit, but I believe it's worth it.

In fact, it was my spouse, Morgan Lemmer-Webber, who convinced me we needed to join the program regardless of the funding situation. Morgan tutors high school students in foreign languages as part of her funding for grad school. Recently one of the young women she was tutoring told her that she had joined an engineering class, was really enjoying it, but dropped out because she felt uncomfortable being the only woman in the class. The woman explained that nobody had been impolite to her, in fact the other students seemed happy to have her there, but despite this and really enjoying the material, it was difficult for her to be there because she felt socially uncomfortable.

I think we've had the same issue in free software for some time, but happily this is changing. Outreach programs like OPW and continued work on things like OpenHatch's Open Source Comes to Campus and its emphasis on diversity as well as increased attention to diversity issues at conferences and et cetera are helping to make these places more welcoming. (I've been convinced of this since I saw Lenore Blum speak on their success in increasing the participation of women in CS at Carnegie Mellon, which increased its enrolling female students in CS from 7% to 38% five years using similar strategies.) It's important to me that MediaGoblin is taking part in helping to make this change.

Anyway, if you are interested in helping to make up the difference and this strikes a chord with you, the campaign is no longer really running, but you can still donate!

Donate...

All that said above, the really important thing of course is that we're participating in these programs. If you're considering applying to either program: please do so, and come by and introduce yourself! (Especially on IRC!)

MediaGoblin sprint on the 24th: At LibrePlanet, and on the Internet!

Hey all, exciting news! We're having a sprint at LibrePlanet 2013... and on the internet! We'll be running this Sunday the 24th of March 2013 from 9:00AM-5:00PM EST... (that's 5AM-1PM UTC!)

If you're at the conference, join us in room 109. We'll also be running the sprint online, in parallel! Join us in #mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net! We've got a wiki page related to the sprint. Check it out!

If you've been interested in getting involved in MediaGoblin, this sprint will be a great time to do so! We hope to see you there!

MediaGoblin 0.3.3: Pixel Party

MediaGoblin 0.3.3: Pixel Party banner
16-bit pixelized Gavroche rockin' out with some Liberated Pixel Cup friends. Dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GNU GPL version 3 or later. Pixel art Gavroche by Christopher Allan Webber, everything else by LPC base artwork team.

Welcome to MediaGoblin 0.3.3! Our tech lead Chris Webber recently finished awarding prizes to the Liberated Pixel Cup contest participants. MediaGoblin is shaping up to be a perfect place to build video game artwork where there is usually a unified theme or look to characters, items and backgrounds. When we first started building MediaGoblin, we envisioned a freedom-respecting collaboration space for artists -- a place where they could share images, videos and sound. It would be easy to control who to share with and simple to figure out how work was licensed. We've made some great progress towards these goals in this release.

First of all, let's take a look at what got easier for users. We built a fancy new dropdown menu so you can see all the upload tools up at the top of your home page -- or not -- you can easily toggle back and forth.

When you upload stuff, you'll get a nice mnemonic URL. Maybe you hadn't noticed the funny code URL's? Or maybe you have noticed because we inadvertently helped you send the wrong link to the right person.. or the right link to the wrong person? Anyway, they are fixed up all nice now. You get a URL with your title with a couple numbers at the end to make it unique.

We also made the collection creation a bit more verbose and hopefully more intuitive. Mmmm, verbiage...

We made a number of improvements to the back-end handling of video. We fixed the video thumbnails. We also made big improvements to the way files get copied around which makes much better use of memory, a critical boon for video storage. Also, MediaGoblin no longer automatically transcodes videos that don't need it. If you're uploading the right size .webm or an .ogg Theora file, you can host them directly without conversion. Plus we tweaked the video player so it resizes with your browser, which is much nicer for mobile devices!

Our last improvement to the user experience is the ability to set a default Creative Commons license for all your uploads. You can still set individual items separately, but if you have a favorite license you use for most of your stuff, you won't have to specify it each time you upload new files.

Oh, and you might notice above that you can now also delete your account from your user settings!

Pluginifying proceeds at a pleasing pace! We moved the OpenStreetMap and Geolocation function out to a plugin. It's still included by default, but it helped us to test the plugin interface and allows users to put something else in there if they want to. We also refined the template hooks to make it easier for plugin authors to hook their features in exactly where they want them, top, side, bottom whatever part of the page makes sense for their specific plugin.

As part of our goal to make MediaGoblin a leaner and easier install, we eliminated a library from the installation process. We've also started working towards getting MediaGoblin packaged with popular GNU/Linux distributions. (Afraid we'll skip your favorite? Help us get it in there and we won't!) Expect more news on this exciting front in the next few months.

All of the fundraising gifts are out! (Well, a few international rewards left, but we'll get to them this week!) Hooray!! As much fun as it was to watch the money/progress bar and mail things out to all our lovely supporters, in the future we are looking for less labor intensive funding models. Feel free to send us your ideas for grants, potential collaborators with access to funding and customization contracts that will help us fund the future of MediaGoblin!

The last word goes to thanking of all our contributors; translators, designers, documenters, coders, bug-senders, nitpickers and promoters. As our codebase gets larger, lots of things get a bit more... well, complicated. We really appreciate the folks who have been around for a while and know how things works around here and we are super-grateful to the new folks who have been willing to jump in and learn how things work around here. Thanks to: Aleksej Serdjukov, András Veres-Szentkirályi, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond (from Samba TNG), Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Mark Holmquist, Odin Hørthe Omdal, Runar Petursson, Sebastian Spaeth, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, Stefano Zacchiroli, Tiberiu C. Turbureanu, and Tran Thanh Bao (pythonsnake)! MediaGoblin wouldn't exist without all of you!

As always, if you're interested in more details, check the release notes!

Got ideas for plugins or feedback for us? Talk to us! Visit our IRC, it's #mediagoblin on freenode.net! If you want regular updates, join the mailing list or email us at press@mediagoblin.org

Send a message: donate to the FSF

During the MediaGoblin campaign, many people came up to me and said something along the lines of: "You know, I'm really glad to hear about this campaign. I've been wanting the FSF to do more along the lines of helping fund free software projects" and "I'm really glad to see the FSF returning to more directly supporting software development again" or otherwise saying they were excited to see the FSF support some aspect of MediaGoblin that was really important to them for user freedom reasons (such as engaging free network services, building infrastructure to help with media hosting freedom, et cetera). Maybe you are one of these people!

Well, 2012 has come to a close and 2013 is just beginning, and as with every year, the FSF has an annual fundraising drive. This year the FSF's campaign is titled "Dollars to Decibels", and the implication is that you should donate to help the FSF continue to speak strongly. And that's true; I think the FSF's most important role above all is to be an ethical leader in the free software movement. So for that reason alone, you should donate to the FSF!

However, I think the reverse is also true: you should give money to the FSF not just so they can help send a message, but also to send a message to the FSF. If you are one of the forementioned people who thinks that this is a good direction for the FSF to go in, there's a powerful way to let them know: donate, and inform them that one of the reasons you are lending your support is because you think this is a great direction for the organization to go in.

The FSF did get a 10% cut of the money raised for MediaGoblin's campaign, and that might sound like a lot, but if you do the math on 43k raised, it's only $4300.00... that's not a bad chunk of change to get, but it's also nowhere near the annual budget to fulfill the needs of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF is a small organization with limited resources, and it's important for the organization to evaluate carefully where to put those resources. By donating and telling them that you believe this type of work is important, you send two messages: 1) that this is important to their base of supporters, which is a good message in and of itself, and 2) that this type of work is actually itself a way to raise resources, because there is additional funding brought in by a membership that feels that the things important to them are being engaged by the organization.

So! To wrap this up, if that makes sense to you, do the following: send in your donation to the FSF. If you're joining as a new member, there's a box on the form that says why... that's a great place to put that message. (Oh, and if somehow I convinced you to join, it would be interesting to see that... my referral number is #3485.) Otherwise, if renewing, doing a one-time donation, or if you've already donated, you can help by sending an email to donate@fsf.org. I know they'll be listening!

MediaGoblin 0.3.2: Goblinverse

MediaGoblin 0.3.2: Goblinverse banner
As you can see, our rockin' space pilot goblin is fixing up her ship with a part she's printed out which she found on a MediaGoblin site using our new 3d model support!

Things are starting to get back to normal around here. After the tremendous outpouring of support you showed us during the fundraising campaign, we were a bit winded. There are still stickers and goodies to mail out (we haven't forgotten!) but we also found time to push out one final 2012 release. A few things had been teetering on the edge of finished and a few things needed to get smoothed out to pave the way for a fantastic 2013.

We've blogged about this, we've collared people at holiday parties, we've done everything but make a Gangnam Style parody video about it... but in case you haven't heard, you can now upload 3d models to MediaGoblin, whoo! This means you can build your own free-as-in-freedom Thingiverse replacement and start printing out objects. We support the sharing of STL and OBJ files. MediaGoblin can also call on Blender to create nice image previews during upload. Or if you prefer, you can use JavaScript to display live 3d previews in WebGL-enabled browsers (we use the thingiview.js library to do this).

Thanks again to LulzBot for sponsoring this exciting advancement in MediaGoblin's offerings!

We really want 2013 to be the year of the MediaGoblin plugin. We made it possible for plugins to include their own models. We also have a working API, which means there is a nice standard way for you to hook your extensions to MediaGoblin. You can also go the other way and use webhooks or callbacks to make it easier to connect MediaGoblin into other applications. This makes it possible to start on applications for submitting media from all different types of devices. We've enabled OAuth support so that MediaGoblin will be able to securely talk to other sources -- like phones or other applications -- whatever you like. Want to learn more? Joar has built some cool demo applications you can check out: automgtic, an automatic media uploader for your desktop and OMGMG, an example of a web application hooking up to the API.

Speaking of phones, there is now an Android client in the works! Call us, maybe?

You can see above an example of an image uploaded to a MediaGoblin instance from an Android phone. Pretty cool, huh?

We've also continued making things nicer for the user at home. It's now easier than ever to organize your MediaGoblin account. We've built in collections, so you can group media you like into your own curated galleries.

The thumbnail display is now a bit cleaner. We also tidied up the HTML output in general by optimizing the way whitespace gets trimmed.

New OpenStreetMap license dropdown

Geolocation and OpenStreetMap support is now on by default. We've even tweaked the OpenStreetMap license menu to make it more intuitive.

That's the big features of this release! You can also read more in our release notes.

Thank you to everyone who helped us write code, raise money, test features, create swag or offered opinions! We are so glad that we got a chance to work with you in 2012 and are very much looking forward to the challenges and achievements that 2013 will bring. Thanks to MediaGoblin contributors who worked on this release: Aaron Williamson, Aeva Ntsc, Christopher Allan Webber, Duncan Paterson, Deb Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jef van Schendel, Joar Wandborg, Emily O'Leary, Nathan Yergler, Sebastian Spaeth, Kuno Woudt, and Will Kahn-Greene! And special thanks to Morgan Lemmer-Webber for doing a lot of work to help us coordinate rewards stuff and the Free Software Foundation for hosting and promoting our fundraising campaign! (By the way... they're currently running a fundraising campaign of their own... please donate!)

Want to join the party in 2013? We'd love to have you! Visit our IRC channel, #mediagoblin on freenode.net! If you want regular updates, join the mailing list or email us your thoughts and questions at press@mediagoblin.org

PS: We're still working on sending out the fundraising rewards. Take a look at this first test of the 3d Gavroche figurine printed on Aeva's LulzBot!

"Media Goblins" photo CC BY-SA 3.0 by Aeva Ntsc... the actual .blend files and STLs of Gavroche also CC BY-SA 3.0 and will be released after the rewards go out. ;)

MediaGoblin crowdfunding campaign: huge success!

Well the campaign is over.... and before anything else, I think we should take a moment to say: We did it! The campaign was a success! Thank you EVERYONE who supported the campaign! YOU ROCK!

Our goal, technically, was 60k, but we weren't running an all-or-nothing campaign, so we decided to set our goal higher than our "bare minimum". In several meetings with Deb and Will, I remember saying, "well, if we hit 40k, I think I'm going to feel really good about things." And we didn't just hit 40k... we got a bit above it, beyond 42k even (which, as I said in a previous blogpost, has nerd-significance in showing our place in the grander scheme of life, the universe, and everything)!

This is no small accomplishment and we should feel proud of it... we deserve to feel proud of it!

So you are probably wondering! What exactly did you all finance? How can you expect this set of money to be used? Well, let me tell you! Basically: you have bought a year (plus a couple bonus months, actually) of me working on MediaGoblin fulltime! I take this very seriously... more on how I think that will pan out... but first let's have a breakdown of how we got to that.

We weren't sure originally how much money it was likely that we were going to be able to raise. This is one reason why we both shot higher than the bare minimum, but also why the video said "hire our talented developers and designers" while the actual campaign page said "hire Chris Webber, and if we get more, pay for even more people to do work". Basically, it was really hard to tell before the campaign launched how much money would come in. Would it be 15k? Would it be 150k? We didn't really know. If we raised enough, it would be great to pay for multiple people to work on things. We estimated about a 25% overhead... 10% on the FSF handling the fundraising infrastructure and finance stuff (which is less than this has actually cost them) and about 15% on fulfilling rewards and a few other costs. So 60k was the estimated cost to pay me for a full year... which would mean 45k after everything else. That's a smallish salary for a programmer (especially without benefits in the US, and especially with my spouse in graduate school), but livable, and we budgeted that as possible. So when Deb, Will, and I discussed what we would shoot for as a reasonable goal, we thought 60k would cover things for me to lead the project fulltime for a year. But would we hit above that or below that? We didn't really know.

Of course, we actually didn't hit 60k, and I'm still saying that I'm going to work a year fulltime, plus! So how does that work out?

Basically, there are one and half months left of 2012. I won't be taking any payment for that, but I will be working (hence the plus). A lot of the next month and a half will be involved with fulfilling donation rewards and et cetera regarding the campaign, as well as wrapping up a few small prior obligations. So that's the plus. So what that also means is that I will be working fulltime on MediaGoblin for a full year... and a very literal full year in multiple senses!... from start to finish of 2013. (To make up the difference since this does not cover my full expenses I will be doing some contracting for a little bit on weekends.)

I consider this to be a real job with real duties, so to that end, I'll be providing biweekly updates once the "full year" starts in 2013. I haven't figured out where yet, whether or not it'll be here or on the mailing list or to the donors list or on the wiki or on my personal blog, but I'll be making updates somewhere. You financed this... you deserve to be kept in the loop!

And there's quite a lot to do. We've laid out a roadmap to 1.0, and it's quite a tall order. By completing this fundraiser it isn't the case that we now no longer need volunteer and community development... we actually need that now more than ever! (One of the reasons I left my job to focus on MediaGoblin fulltime was because we have a strong community, but it wasn't getting the level of attention it deserved!) Whether or not you want to help code, do graphic design, write docs, do testing, or something else... we could really use your help! So please do join us!

Thank you all! Thanks to you, 2013 really will be the year of MediaGoblin development! I know I am looking forward to it!

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