Draft blog post for MediaGoblin.org

[Ben Sturmfels]

Hi Folks,

Here's the draft blog post I promised at the community meeting. Please
reply with any feedback and I'll aim to publish early next week.

Regards,
Ben


The world still needs MediaGoblin!
----------------------------------

Hello Goblin-Lovers! [tap tap] Is this thing still on? ... Great! Well, we've 
had a few polite questions as to what's happening in MediaGoblin-land, given 
our last blog post was a few years back. Let's talk about that.

While development on MediaGoblin has slowed over the last few years, work has 
continued steadily, with significant improvements such as multi-resolution 
video (Vijeth Aradhya) and video subtitles (Saksham) and a bunch of minor 
improvements and bug-fixes. Like most community-driven free software projects, 
progress only happens when people show up and make it happen. Here a list of 
those wonderful people who have contributed over the last few years; my 
apologies if I've missed anyone. Thank you all very much!

   - Andrew Browning (aleph): bug fixes and improvements, merging contributions
   - Boris Bobrov: bug fixes and improvements, merging contributions
   - Chris Lemmer Webber: bug fixes and improvements, community organising, 
ActivityPub
   - Jessica Tallon: bug fixes and improvements, ActivityPub
   - Vijeth Aradhya: multiple-resolition video transcoding/switching
   - Simon Fondrie-Teitler: upgraded/migrated/managed hosting for website, 
Trac, mailing lists and wiki
   - Saksham: lightbox, video subtitles
   - Amelia Rose: bug squashing parties
   - Ben Sturmfels: bug fixes and improvements, migrated mailing lists
   - Iyzsong: bug fixes
   - Berker Peksag: Python 3 bug fixes
   - Johnathan Sandoval: login validation improvement
   - Leah Velleman: localisation
   - Loic Dachary: cleanups
   - Matt Dealsy: UI improments (PyCon AU 2016 sprint)
   - Kesra: bug fixes (PyConAU 2016 sprint)
   - Josh Crompton: UI improvements (PyCon AU 2016 sprint)
   - Olivier Mehani: OSM tiles, datetime format config
   - Alexandre Frankie: docs improvements
   - Stéphane Péchard: collection option to addmedia
   - Robert Smith: bug fixes
   - Simen Heggestøyl: bug fixes and improvements
   - Romain Porte: tags in API
   - Chrysn: EXIF rotation
   - DPG: license option updates
   - Dod: bug fixes
   - Michael Lynch: dev setup improvements
   - Ian Kelling: set up and imported our mailing lists (twice!)

In recent years, Chris Lemmer Webber has stepped back from the role of 
much-loved project leader to focus on ActivityPub and the standardisation of 
federated social networking protocols. That process has been a lot of work but 
has concluded successfully with ActivityPub becoming a W3C [recommendation in 
2018](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/). The MediaGoblin community would like 
to express it's gratitude for Chris's charismatic leadership, community 
organising, publicity and sheer hard work, as well as congratulate him on the 
success of ActivityPub. Please give a big cheer for Chris! 

During that time Andrew Browning, Boris Bobrov and Simon Fondrie-Teitler have 
led the MediaGoblin project, supported the infrastructure and worked with 
numerous new contributors to add new features and bug-fixes. I've stepped up 
more recently to support this great work and have been working on a pilot 
project to [publish culturally significant 
media](https://www.sturm.com.au/blog/preserving-indigenous-culture-using-mediagoblin/)
 in remote indigenous communities.

Back in February we held the first community meeting in quite a while. We met 
via Mumble audio-conference and [discussed short-term project 
needs](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/mediagoblin-devel/2020-02/msg00020.html)
 including problems with the issue tracker, urgent/blocking bugs, a release, a 
bug squashing party, and the need for this blog post. We'll be diving into some 
of the longer-term strategy next meeting. Keep an eye on the mailing list for 
the announcement and please join us.

Based on that meeting, our current short-term priorities are:

1. Improve/replace the issue tracker. There was general agreement that our 
current issue tracker, Trac, is discouraging new contributions. Firstly, 
registrations and notifications were not working properly. Secondly, the 
process of submitting code is more complicated than other modern collaboration 
tools. Our friends at FSF are currently work to select a [new collaboration 
tool](https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Fsf_2019_forge_evaluation), so we'll look 
forward to evaluating their recommendation when it is announced. In the 
short-term, we've fixed the registration and notification problems with Trac to 
keep us going.

2. Make a minor release. A release is an important opportunity to highlight the 
work that's been done over the last few years such as the multi-resolution 
video and subtitles I mentioned, as well as important fixes such as to audio 
upload in Python 3. This will likely also be our last Python 2-compatible 
release. Many of MediaGoblin's dependencies are beginning to drop support for 
Python 2, and time troubleshooting such installation issues takes away from our 
forward-looking work.

3. Organise a bug triage/fixing day. We're planning to nominate a day where a 
group MediaGoblin contributors will make a concerted effort to resolve bugs. 
This is aided by having a team across many timezones.

4. Automate testing of the installation process and test suite. Many of the 
questions we get to the mailing list are installation or dependency related. By 
automating our testing, hopefully across a number of popular operating systems, 
we should be able to reduce these issues and improve the installation 
experience.

We'll look forward to telling you about our longer-term plans soon! For now 
though, from all of us hear at MediaGoblin, please take care of yourselves, 
your families and communities through the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis.