This weekend, my friend Molly de Blanc and I are going to be speaking at LibrePlanet about Nurturing Non-Coders. It feels like a pretty timely topic. The current issue of Model View Culture just published a insightful piece on the treatment of non-technical employees at start-ups and here at MediaGoblin, we've been overwhelmed with non-coding help during our campaign. I'd like to take some time to highlight a few of our amazing volunteers and hopefully inspire some potential non-coders to find a project that needs their help.
Fateh Slavitskaya (of Urchn/Wires for Empathy fame), who is already super-busy with her own 3D animation production work, helped us immensely with the script on our campaign video. She also used her formidable messaging and communication skills to mold our Knight Foundation grant proposal into a cohesive pitch. (See also her own proposal for a free software documentary!) When I say we couldn't have done it without her, I mean it just would not have happened.
Free software activist, Laura Arjona created English and Spanish subtitles for our video allowing us to bring the MediaGoblin word to both Spanish-speakers and deaf and hard of hearing community. Plus, she's been constantly boosting us on social media. She even just gave a lightning talk about getting MediaGoblin into Debian at the Debian Women Minidebconf in Barcelona -- another audience we would not have reached without her initiative.
Speaking of subtitles, we're also really grateful to Pieter van der Eems who did the Dutch subtitles, Matti Lammi who gave us the Finnish version, Sebastian Riedel who added German, French translations by Mathieu Duponchelle, and Czech translations by digital_dreamer. Folks who aren't known to us could be sharing the MediaGoblin video with Finnish, German, French, Czech, and Dutch speakers -- which is pretty exciting. Go internet!
Have you ever wondered why MediaGoblin's stuff has such a lovely consistent aesthetic? It's because of the work of our dedicated designers, like Jef van Schendel who laid down all the original look and feel of MediaGoblin, Jeremy Pope who has done further design and updated us to a more responsive design, and Nils Georg Heinrich Reichert who (via an internship) has been pitching in on the website design -- especially the campaign page. On the video side, Bassam Kurdali (also of Urchn/Wires for Empathy fame!) gave us lots of help with animation direction and advice.
Socially speaking, we also really appreciate folks like Paul Tagliamonte (and others!) who have blogged about us (you can help too!) and everyone else who's re-shared on Diaspora or written in with feedback. MediaGoblin won't succeed if the only people who care about it are the folks writing the code. Or put another way, it takes a virtual village to raise a goblin. Thanks for all your hard work!
