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.

Steel this film I and II have helped shape the debate on copyright policy. The first film focused on the raid against the pirate bay and file sharing culture. Part II took on the broader copyright debate.

Now they are making their interview footage from Steel This Film II available for remixing. Their site features ogg video with time segment requests (similar to what we do here on metavid) and synced transcripts for search. Footage is made available in ogg theora & high quality HDV via bittorrent. They encurge people to download and reuse the footage.

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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.

As development continues for metavidWiki, I am continuing to release updates of the stand alone component mv_embed. Fresh from the Melbourne is the new release of mv_embed .6. You can check out some videos from the conferences I have been attending here: The FOMS free and open media proceedings and the multimedia talks at the linux Australia conference. (both published with the latest release of mv_embed)

Changes in .6 include:
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Engage Media has published a very detailed report on the state of Free and Open source software for online video. Titled: FOSS Codecs For Online Video: Usability Uptake and Development 1.2 the paper details many software application and tools for ~free~ online publishing of video. They even include a mention of mv_embed ;). Their recommendations for pushing for ogg theora in HTML5 and using FOSS whenever possible in Transmission members projects are positive directions for wider open source media wide adoption. check it out

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.

Following the liberalization of their copyright policy earlier this year C-SPAN is now publishing a new index of its House and Senate floor proceedings — The C-SPAN Congressional Chronicle. According to them the video recordings are matched with the text of the Congressional Record as soon as the Record is available. It only includes members who appeared on the floor to deliver or insert their remarks. The text included is what the member submitted. Each appearance has a video link where users can watch and listen to the actual statements. This is great progress!

update see also the sunlight post, and notice the link back in list-by-day descriptions here on metavid

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From the DemocracyTV blog:

There’s a new version of XiphQT, which is the behind-the-scenes code that helps Democracy Player for OSX play Ogg files. We’ll be including this in an upcoming release of ours and it should make Ogg playback much more efficient. If you use the XiphQT plugin yourself, this version supports creation of Oggs, which is very handy.

This theora support means that the RSS feeds generated by MetaVid searches (those funny orange boxes: ) are exportable as channels for your DTV player. You could use a channel for your own Congressman (here’s mine), an issue you care about (like peanut butter), or some combination of the two (Anna Eshoo saying Peanut Butter). The great thing about RSS and DTV is that as new matches to these searches occur, the clips will download automatically — giving you a new and efficient way to sousveil your representative and cause.

update: hmm, it looks like our feeds are broken in the latest democracyPlayer; we’re looking in to why.

Today, C-SPAN has stepped into the digital age and announced the liberalization of their copyright policy. Now online bloggers, citizen journalists, and anyone with something to say about their representative can post any federally sponsored event covered by C-SPAN online without fear of copyright reprisals.

From C-SPAN.org:

C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency– about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks–which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.

This is very good news for all online users of C-SPAN videos. These efforts to modernize their copyright policy should be applauded! Metavid can now focus more more the application layer, building interesting interfaces for remixing, contextualizing & participating with the audio video media assets of our government. The other great news about this announcement is that metavid can begin to capture and make available all of the committee footage broadcasted on C-SPAN in high quality ogg theora

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Sunlight is hosting a $2K congress mashup contest. I (ofcourse) think metavid would make a great base for some interesting mashups. See our short screen grab demoing campaign contributions along side video. The APIs and platform is rough around the edges (things should improve once we start working on it full time ;)… more about that later)…For now the dataset should be usable by those willing to brave the bleeding edge. Let us know if you would like to use metavid data set and we will lend you our metavid expertise and hopefully make your vision is implementable If your just feeling conceptual maybe list your idea on the possibilities page.

If your ready to start hacking congress check out the developer resources in the wiki, and come by #metavid in irc.freenode.net