MediaGoblin 0.5.0: Goblin Force

MediaGoblin 0.5.0: Goblin Force banner

Do you remember when all the best superheroes were part of a team? Sometimes they had a clubhouse and went out on missions together and sometimes they actually formed one mega-super-hero. (I'm apparently on some sort of nostalgia kick this month...) Anyway, that's basically what we've been doing with MediaGoblin. We want all the parts that we build to be able to do awesome stuff on their own, and be part of one huge decentralized web super-force.

In this release we move closer to federation by shifting our OAuth code to be pump.io compatible. Not only that, many of our longstanding pluginification goals were met. We are working towards a more modular web and building a very modular codebase to make it happen. (So meta!)

Firstly, authentication has completely moved over to a plugin system. Thanks go to Rodney Ewing for this awesome work! We're now able to support multiple authentication systems including the standard login/password system,

...and OpenID...

...plus Mozilla Persona.

Maybe *your* customized login system will be next? The framework is flexible and ready for you to build on.

Secondly, all the media types are also now plugins! This means that new media types will be able to all kinds of things. We could support blog posts as a media type or a tumblr-like thing (which is in the works!). Let us know if you want to code up smell-o-vision support. (Just kidding, no one wants to smell the internet!)

The grammar goblins got their wishes granted in this release. The rest of us can use this snazzy new comment preview feature to keep from offending their delicate sensibilities.

Userland gets some nice social improvements too. You'll get notified when someone comments on your media which means you can follow up right away if you want to.

We also eliminated some potential pain points for Admins! If you upload something and it fails mid-processing, it's now possible to send it back to process again. Admins can also tweak media that's already been uploaded. Want to convert a video to a new format or resize all your images? You're going to love the new reprocessing framework. A web interface for reprocessing is coming next.

We also added support for Unicode filenames. Running an international MediaGoblin instance? You won't have to worry about choking on non-ASCII filenames.

We are so lucky that all the best super-heroes are part of our team here at MediaGoblin. Check out all the great folks who helped make this release possible: Alon Levy, Brandon Invergo, Christopher Allan Webber, Duncan Paterson, Dan Callahan, Deb Nicholson, Emily O'Leary, Jakob Kramer, Jessica Tallon, Jim Campbell, Joar Wandborg, Kenneth Dombrowski, Kushal Kumaran, Laura Arjona, Marcel van der Boom, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Rodney Ewing, Sam Clegg, Sebastian Spaeth, Starblessed of Viewskew (hosting help!), sturm, and Tran Thanh Bao. What a list! Thanks to everyone... we couldn't do it without you.

We especially want to thank our meta-superheroes for this summer's amazing output! On the intern/student side, thanks to Aditi Mittal, Emily O'Leary, Jessica Tallon, Natalie Foust, Praveen Kumar, and Rodney Ewing (RJ). On the mentoring end, thanks to Aaron Williamson, Aeva Palecek, Chris Webber, Joar Wandborg, and Sebastian Spaeth. We could not have done this without Google Summer of Code and Gnome's Outreach Program for Women. We promise you a thorough post-summer report on our energetic mentees very soon.

Okay, excited and want to give things an install? Check out our docs! And if upgrading, be sure to read our release notes. There's some important stuff for you to do in there... plus a more complete list of updates for this release!

Meanwhile, our mentoring schedule is about to go from breakneck to merely brisk. Maybe the upcoming 30th anniversary of GNU is inspiring you to find an exciting GNU project to contribute to? At MediaGoblin, we love new contributors! Visit us in IRC; #mediagoblin on freenode.net! Or sign up for regular updates here! Got ideas or questions about our work? Email us at press@mediagoblin.org -- we look forward to hearing from you!

Paranoia Optimization for Our Modern Times

The funny thing about propaganda is that kids grok all the hysteria but none of the context. I was the kind of 80's kid who read Harriet the Spy and watched Get Smart reruns. I often thought about spies and whether or not they were watching me. The stakes were high. As American kids, we were all pretty sure that the Commies were going to bomb us. Or do something even worse that was totally incomprehensible to me as a tween.

As kids, we had loads of time to spend on pointless activities. I decided I would learn to be paranoid. I regularly tiptoed around the house, trying to be as silent as possible. I taped hairs over certain drawers, although the only person who was ever in there was probably my little sister. I practiced darting from tree to tree for cover. I was determined to be ready when I finally discovered that I was being followed. I pictured myself dissolving into the landscape and confounding Soviet spies. In my even more grandiose moments, I imagined becoming a counter-spy and saving the United States of America. Movies like E.T. and The Goonies had basically proven to us that kids are easily underestimated by villains.

A reasonable person would look at my childhood behavior and say that I was much too paranoid. My anti-surveillance measures were all out of proportion to any threat I was likely to encounter. A quiet middle class girl, in a boring Maryland suburb? I was never on any kind of Russian super-spy watchlist, even if my father did work for the government.

As an adult, I don't worry about Soviet spies anymore. I don't always grab the Malcolm X seat at a restaurant (facing the main door, in case assassins are coming.) I don't tape hairs over doorways to see if people have been in my house and I try not to startle my neighbors by sneaking up on them. But lately, I have come to feel that I am "not paranoid enough." I'm not exactly sure when that happened. Maybe passage of the Patriot Act is the point when my personal paranoia level became too low for today's world?

Unlike my childhood self, modern internet users actually are subject to constant surveillance. The only thing that saves most of us from the immediate consequences of this is luck. You're "lucky" to have no friends outside the US, "lucky" to have no unusual interests and "lucky" to have completely ignored politics for all of your adult life. In a world where everyone is "lucky," our participatory democracy becomes a sham, the global economy grinds to halt and dinner parties are exceedingly boring. Start prosecuting dissent and whistle-blowing with a vengeance and it gets downright Orwellian. So what do we do? Should I go back to storing get-away money on the underside of my dresser and only using fake names with strangers?

What we need right now is the right kind of paranoia. The kind of paranoia that protects you against the people who are actually out to get you and looks at the ways that they are actually likely to do you harm. Our most obvious enemy is the NSA and the most likely way they are coming for us is via their extreme facility in controlling a highly centralized web. Joshua told us that the only winning move is not to play -- which is fine if you're a machine. Your college reunion isn't being organized on Facebook. Your friends aren't posting adorable pictures of their children on Flickr. And you aren't trying to build a social movement when everyone else would like to use Google Docs for everything.

The right way to be paranoid is to adopt a long-term strategy. Build robust decentralized alternatives that people will want to use and we become a million grains of sand. Obtaining all of the information becomes nearly impossible. So I say, without irony (and trust me, we sort of perfected irony in the 80's) I want you to join the revolution. Pitch in however you can. We'd certainly welcome your contributions at MediaGoblin, but maybe you'd rather work on pump.io or Diaspora? Or another one of the many fine alternatives listed here ...we're into that too. The important thing is that you get paranoid, so you don't have to be "lucky."

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!

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