Your friendly neighborhood Linux systems admin here with a post about the Linux Foundation web infrastructure. The web site has grown organically one piece at a time. The existing main application for www.linuxfoundation.org is Mediawiki. This was put together as a temporary web site when the Free Standards Group and Open Source Development Labs were in the process of merging into the Linux Foundation. That was in December of 2006.

Since this time many other needs have come up. We added Wordpress MU for our blogs. We added a Phorum installation for OpenPrinting discussions, forums.openprinting.org. Our events site is run on Drupal and CiviCRM.

The issue has always been how to meet all the technological needs with a bare minimum of staff. Many of you out there could code solutions in place to glue the applications together. Since, I am not a strong developer I have focused on staying with the stock applications for ease of upgrades.

How do you put together a cohesive infrastructure completely based on open source applications that work together seamlessly without coding highly customized solutions?

We are trying to answer that question.

During the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit back in April we had many of the keynote and panel sessions as well as several interviews filmed with the intention of posting them online.

We had asked the third party company we were working with to provide both completely open OGG and mostly open Flash FLV formats as the final product. Unfortunately, they did not have the in house skills to produce the open OGG format.

In the interest of getting the video's out to the public sooner rather than later we went ahead and published the FLV files in the LF Video Gallery. Youtube for better or worse has mad FLV the de facto standard for online video. Needless to say we have gotten many complaints about our lack of an open codec version of the videos like here and here.

First, let me say that audio and video codecs are not my area of expertise. So before you flame me for my ignorance I have beaten you to the punch. Based on a few posts like this one: Open Codecs it looks like OGG with the Theora video codec and the Vorbis audio codec is the standard open video format to work with.

The obvious next step is to convert the files to OGG our selves, even though video is not an area of expertise. The LWN posts helpfully pointed out: