wikimania 2008 is under way here in Alexandria, Egypt. Lots of good talks, and its quite warm Although not as hot here in Alexandria as it was in Cairo… anyway… here are the slides (ppt, odp) for the presentation i will give tomorrow. As with last year wikipedia weekly is providing coverage of the event.

This is the 3rd wikimania that metavid has been represented, 2006 in Boston and 2007 in Taipei were also featured on this blog

The Personal Democracy Forum conference is under way here in NY. A lot of really cool projects and talks I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In questioning the structure of current online political mobilization he highlighted the network capacity to build a new rather simply act in reaction to or attempt to open existing power structures. As an example Linus did not protest outside of Microsoft office for them to build a better OS, and Jimmy Wales did not throw stones at Britannica until they became more open. He points to new incorporations and ways to organize groups of people without rigid hierarchy or centralization.

In the context of video technologies there were some interesting projects as well. Remixamerica.org was showing their platform for remixing and promoting political videos using the open kaltura video editor. We will see about adding the metavid archive as a source for remixes Also mogulus was showing off their platform for realtime video broadcasting from a small portable nokia camara.

I will be giving a short demo of Metavid Tuesday afternoon.

This Thursday and Friday the politics web 2.0 conference is taking place in London. Metavid is presenting on Friday. From the site:

Has there been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media - a new web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.

This years NetSquared featured projects includes metavid along with 20 other proposed or in-development net mashups for social change. Featured project developers and social innovators will meet up in late may for the net squared conference. More from the site:

The NetSquared Conference, will be on May 27 and 28, 2008 in San Jose, CA. As in the past two years, the two-day event will bring together innovators in social benefit initiatives, business models, funding for philanthropic initiatives, software development, and technology to advance social change around the globe using social networks and social Web tools such as blogging, podcasting, and virtual communities.

I will be presenting a position paper at the W3C video workshop next week. I will be joined by Siliva from annodex. We will push standardization around free formats. Our position papers have been posted on the w3 site. Here is an excerpt from my position paper:

Critical to making video a first class citizen on the web is extending the properties of other first class citizens like text and images as they apply to video. These properties should include:

• Standardization around a freely implementable format. So both proprietary and free browsers can support playback and (eventually) encoding without licensing costs.
• A standard open format for search engines and web services to access video metadata such as close captions, tags, chapter info etc.
• Standard ways of transclusion/reference/embedding of video content. Additionally a standard url request scheme for retrieving segments of video streams is needed.
• Use of existing http protocols for access and retrieval of video content.

Wikimania 07 is upon us. I will be presenting the work in progress metavid mediaWiki extension. The abstract is as follows:

Metavid Wiki - Real Time Collaborative Semantic Audio/Video Metadata in MediaWiki. Metavid Wiki is the in development second iteration of the Metavid archive project (metavid.org). Metavid Wiki builds off of the MediaWiki code base, the semantic wiki extension and the first version of the metavid. Metavid Wiki employs a structured temporal name space with the wiki page model to enable dynamic, versioned metadata for arbitrary stream segments. Congressional data along with stream metadata is used to build a rich query space for stream segment search. These segments can then be recombined into versioned sequences and referenced internally or externally

update: for audio podcasts of the event check out wikipedia weekly

update:  slides are available here

Metavid will be participating in the Beyond Broadcast conference of 2007. Like last years conference its shaping up to be a key exploration of participatory culture and its potential to enable powerful tools for citizen engagement. Henry Jenkins giving the Keynote and schedule is action packed with projects and speakers addressing the state of politics and participation on the internet. look interesting… see the schedule

Metavid will be co-running the beyond youtube working group where we will explore contemporary political participatory media, and give some usage demos of metavid.

Like last year it will be possible to “tune in” via the internet. So if your interested in seeing portions of the conference check out the beyond broadcast site at or around February 24th

This last Thursday and Friday just before linux.conf.au 2007, Open Source Media developers meet in Sydney, to hack on the future of Open Media. FOMS had a diversity of participants ranging from low level audio driver hackers & codec researchers to tool developers & online open media project maintainers all of whom worked together to identify next steps for open media.

The developer meeting established Community Goals for the near and long term. Goals include improving low level open media infrastructure, a push for native ogg theora playback in the base firefox install & getting embed oggplay support into mediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia).

Metavid will be participating in a mini-conference put on by Sunlight and the Berkman center on how information technologies can be applied to local political information. From the blog post:

On January 15th, the Sunlight Foundation and the Berkman Institute will be sponsoring a day long working session titled “Local Political Information in an Internet Era.” The meeting will be hosted by the Berkman Institute in Cambridge, MA on the Harvard Law School Campus.

We are interested in how the Internet — through blogs and other tools — can bring citizens more or better information about their elected officials.

As mentioned in the post if you know anyone involved in local politics & information technologies be sure to pass on the link

On January the 11th-12th the FOMS (foundations of open media software) conference will take place in Sydney Australia with linux.conf.au taking place the next week. Open media hackers will get together and discuss the future of open media. from the site:

The aim of the FOMS meeting is get the right people together to take the next steps in open media software. Meet and discuss your plans for the next 12 months with other developers and forge relationships to unwind the kinks, making open media kick ever more ass.

This should be an interesting gathering and an opportunity to plan & strategize how to maximize the adoption of open media, software, platforms and codecs throughout the internet. Or to borrow a phrase, its time for open media to kick ass and chew bubble gum & we all out of bubble gum.