This series of post was inspired by Barrett Golding's Hacks & Hackers digital projects round-up, which highlights some high-level initiatives coming out of public media, some of which may be developing or adopting standards for content distribution, aggregation, or preservation. The challenge with many standards in public media is they depend on infrastructure, systems, or getting a large enough group within the community to commit to supporting it. I'm hoping this is a practical set of several easy-to-implement standards in public media digital projects, especially as organizations are thinking about ways of building communities, becoming better neighbors, talking about aggregation and decentralization, and more. The standards I'm discussing are used in contexts much large than public media, are inherently useful, and systems-agnostic.

Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

There is currently no centralized, accessible database of public media organizations, and no group who is willing to take on the headache of populating, maintaining and administering such a creation. Fortunately, most organizations (and likely all the salient ones..) have some web presence and we can use the already-decentralized web to model our decentralized organizational structure. From the project website:
The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do; it is a contribution to the linked information system known as the Web. FOAF defines an open, decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, and the people they describe.
Within the context of public broadcasting, what can FOAF do? (In a gross simplification), if every organization published an authoritative FOAF document, containing any information each station thought relevant, we could link, aggregate and query the decentralized data set to begin to answer any number of questions programmatically (where is the closest NPR station? what is the URL for streaming audio for station XYZ? what is the pledge phone number for every station in Wisconsin?). Here's a quick demonstration document for a public media station: 
<rdf:RDF
      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
      xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
      xmlns:admin="http://webns.net/mvcb/">
<foaf:PersonalProfileDocument rdf:about="">
  <foaf:maker rdf:resource="#wkar"/>
  <foaf:primaryTopic rdf:resource="#wkar"/>
</foaf:PersonalProfileDocument>
<foaf:Organization rdf:ID="wkar">
<foaf:name>WKAR</foaf:name>
<foaf:age>78</foaf:age>
<foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:webmaster@wkar.org"/>
<foaf:phone rdf:resource="tel:+15174329527" />
<foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://wkar.org"/>
<foaf:weblog rdf:resource="http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wkar/news.newsmain" />
<foaf:tipjar rdf:resource="http://wkar.org/give/" />
<foaf:tipjar rdf:resource="tel:5174323120x371" />
<foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf rdf:resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKAR_(AM)"/>
<foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf rdf:resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKAR-FM"/>
<foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf rdf:resource="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKAR-TV"/>
<foaf:depiction rdf:resource="http://wkar.org/images/wkar-w-140x50.gif"/>
<foaf:logo rdf:resource="http://wkar.org/images/wkar-w-140x50.gif"/>
<foaf:member rdf:resource="http://www.mprn.org/foaf.rdf#mprn" />
<foaf:member rdf:resource="http://www.pbs.org/foaf.rdf#pbs" />
<foaf:member rdf:resource="http://www.npr.org/foaf.rdf#npr" />
</foaf:Organization>
</rdf:RDF>
I'm making no claims about the accuracy, correctness or well-formedness of this document, I'm just offering it as an example of what could be done. Because this format is just an RDF document, it is trivial (and encouraged) to extend the FOAF vocabulary with domain-specific information from other sources, e.g. the BBC Programmes ontology. FOAF has rules and methods for FOAF document discovery and by creating a mesh of organizations we could assemble a full, real-time picture of public media organizations without the overhead of centralization and contribute to a tiny piece of the larger web of knowledge without significant work on the part of any single individual.