I’m very pleased to announce that Metavid has been awarded a grant by Sunlight Foundation. This grant will fund full-time development on this project for a year in addition to expansion of hardware infrastructure. We’re very excited about what this means for the project: more stability, new features and better accessibility.

We’re happy to continue our cooperation with Sunlight, whose mission is, “to use the transformative power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparence and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy.”

Watch this space for announcements of what we are (and will soon be) implementing.

Update: Also see UCSC coverage of the announcement

A few days ago, the NY Times editorialized in favor of relaxing the rules regarding cameras on the floor of the US Congress. This comes on the heels of an open letter (PDF File) by C-SPAN president Brian Lamb calling for independent media cameras (particularly C-SPAN’s) on the floor of the House. In addition to editorials on his behalf, Lamb appeared on numerous media outlets including this interview on NPR’s Talk of The Nation to lobby for these changes.

Much of the discourse around these proposed changes is a critique of the cinematography of C-SPAN, particularly on the head-on closeups that the House Rules require. Furthermore, Lamb suggests that relaxing the rules would be more consistent with House Speaker Pelosi’s “most open, honest and ethical congress ever,” with an implication that the government may be covering something up through these tight controls.

On Friday, Pelosi rejected these proposed changes and will leave the House in charge of the cameras. There are a few issues at work here, I’ll address them briefly and what they mean for this project. More after the fold. (more…)

The Digital Arts and New Media program at UCSC has issued its call for applicants for the 07-08 term. I thought I would point out some of the participatory culture project groups. People interested in a MFA graduate program and participatory culture should take a look Over the next two years two project groups will take place under the Participatory Culture focus area in the DANM program. One focusing on tools for media activists and the other focusing on technologies for civil society & democracy.

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The Sunlight Foundation has given metavid a small grant to continue development on the metavid project. The funds will be used to support software development and buy computer hardware for a new capture system capable of real-time broadcast and archival.

About the Sunlight Foundation:

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.

The metavid project thesis papers are now available online. Dale’s paper gives a detailed account of the metavid project its motivations and methodology.

The paper publishes details of C-SPAN’s take down request. The requests details are published to illustrate how C-SPAN blurs the line between government produced public domain material and C-SPAN produced content. C-SPAN restrictions on content are shown to limit citizen’s ability to techno-mediate these public media assets.
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We recently relocated the code base to UCSC’s dFroge code management system. This will make code management a bit easier on the metavid developers. The dforge system is analogous to sourceforge in function, but is being hosted by UCSC. The underling source code for the UCSC system is gForge which is also open source. The site primarily hosts university projects but is open to collaboration from other non-university participants and the source code is publicly available for many of the projects hosted on UCSC dForge.

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We recently relocated the code base to UCSC’s dFroge code management system. This will make code management a bit easier on the metavid developers. The dforge system is analogous to sourceforge in function, but is being hosted by UCSC. The underling source code for the UCSC system is gForge which is also open source. The site primarily hosts university projects but is open to collaboration from other non-university participants and the source code is publicly available for many of the projects hosted on UCSC dForge.

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