Concerto is a type of digital signage, which is essentially a fancy term for the use of digital screens, such as televisions, to broadcast specific messages about events, services, and other noteworthy items. But Concerto sets itself apart from many other signage platforms in a couple big ways: first, it's free for anyone to use and deploy, it's designed in a unique way to facilitate the sharing of messages across large communities, and it's targeted at big public spaces, such as universities and townships.

Just take a look at how Concerto is being used today! The first, and most vibrant network encompasses the Troy, New York, campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). People at RPI use Concerto every day to advertise extracurricular activities, lectures and seminars, and unique offerings for the entire college community. If I have an RPI account, I can visit Concerto on the Web to upload graphic flyers right from my computer. Concerto's unique philosophy encourages many different groups of students, faculty, and staff members to help moderate and maintain the network. Learn more about RPI and other ways to utilize Concerto here.

The most obvious sign of a Concerto network is a physical display, such as a flat panel television, that shows the Concerto front end. Concerto allows each individual display to look completely unique and deliver graphical and text-based messages that may be specific to a particular audience or location.

Concerto started at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (also known as RPI), the oldest tech university in the English-speaking world, in the spring of 2008. The RPI network has since grown to over 20 displays. To date, over 1,000 users have featured over 3,000 unique messages on the RPI Concerto network.

The Web Technologies Group, a student skunkworks at RPI, thought up, designed, and implemented every part of Concerto up to this point. But now, the code for version 1 has been released under the GNU Public License (v2.0), so the number of people behind development on the project is bound to grow. Concerto 2, which is licensed under the Apache Software License (v2.0), is in developement by many of the same people, as well as some new people.  New developers are always welcome!

You're going to need a server to use for distributing content that runs MySQL and PHP, for starters. For each public Concerto display, you'll need a computer with the ability to output video to an external display, as well as the display hardware itself. Luckily, that display can be most anything that interfaces with that computer's display port, including a whole host of HDMI-compatible TVs and pretty much every computer monitor known to man. Learn more about deploying Concerto here.

Never fear. You just need to find somebody who has some server administration experience. If you cower at the sight of a command-line terminal, you're probably not the right person to set Concerto up. But we can help. Just drop us a line or post a message on our Google Group asking for help.

First, download the code and try installing it somewhere. You can check out our code on Github and contact us to work together on code development. You can also contact us through the Blog. We're just starting out, so there's a lot of room for growth as our community gets larger. But you can be assured that helping out as a Concerto developer will be a rewarding, challenging experience.

Concerto is released under the GNU General Public License v2. That means that Concerto is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the License. It's important to note that GPL v2 has explicit instructions regarding derivative works and submitting code modifications back to us for review and possible incorporation into the existing codebase. Please pay attention to the License!