Ten years of Plumi and looking ahead to 2017

It’s been ten years now since we released our first public version of Plumi with a vision to provide free democratic access to video distribution, and I’m very proud of EngageMedia’s work to sustain the project through many successes and challenges.

I’d like to thank the whole team at EngageMedia, and all our visionaries, programmers, designers, testers, documenters, supporters and organisers over the years including Andrew Lowenthal, Dave Fregon, Andy Nicholson, Lachlan Musicman, Dimitris Moraitis, Chris Psaltis, Mike Muzurakis, Yiannis Chatzikonstantinou, Sam Stainsby, Jean Jordaan, Nate Aune, Rok Garbas, Steve Anderson, Giannis Stergiou and more. See also: https://github.com/plumi/plumi.app/blob/master/docs/CONTRIBUTORS.txt

Impact producers, video and technology activists, human rights defenders and social justice and environmental advocates across SE Asia and internationally continue to work with EngageMedia across a number of program areas, and contribute as always to the vision for and purpose of Plumi development. See more about EngageMedia’s partnerships and projects here: http://engagemedia.org and learn about the Video for Change network here: http://v4c.org

Looking ahead, 2017 will hopefully see Plumi users join forces to take Plumi forward, with a particular eye on getting our “externally-hosted videos” feature out there, which we have done a lot of work on but isn’t quite finished. We are also talking with leaders in the Plone community about ideas such as inviting students to work on particular code or documentation projects, and look towards merging some of Plumi’s base video engine with Plone core and other major video products for Plone, which would help sustain Plumi’s viability into the future.

At this point we’d like to put it out there to Plumi users that we are looking for contributions in order to help EngageMedia maintain the project on behalf of the Plumi community, which has depended on philanthropic funding and donations – never a steady source.

Maintaining the project includes the email lists, issues tracker, Plumi blog, coordination of development, development on core functionality such as recent operating system compatibility updates, updating components, UI bug fixes and improvements, attending Plone conferences and liaising with the Plone community to find and work towards fruitful partnerships.

As always we welcome Python developers to get involved, but we’d also love some financial contributions in 2017 to keep us moving steadily into the future together.

Get in touch on the lists or via the contact form if you think you can help, or want to get involved!

Happy holidays!

Anna Helme on behalf of EngageMedia http://engagemedia.org