open standards

Notes from CONFERENCE CALL on ACM Server Standards
By Stefan Wray
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
10:30 AM CST

CALL PARTICIPANTS

HELEN SOULE, Executive Director, Alliance for Community Media
RICH DESIMONE, ACM Standards Working Group, Chair
JESSE LERMAN, Telvue & ACM Standards Working Group
KEVIN REYNEN, Denver Open Media, CivicPixel, & Open Media Project
STEFAN WRAY, channelAustin & Open Media Project
KATE GORMAN, UPTV & Open Media Project

CALL SUMMARY

The following DRAFT is being presented to the Alliance for Community Media board of directors meeting on July 14, 2009.

DRAFT
Resolution on Open Standards
Alliance for Community Media Board of Directors

Whereas, some Alliance for Community Media members and affiliated organizations want to develop the means to share programming and therefore share video files;

Whereas, the ability to share video files across different platforms requires that metadata standards, file format standards, and other standards be created;

The following DRAFT is being presented to the meeting of the Alliance for Community Media Board of Directors in Portland on July 14, 2009. - Stefan

DRAFT

Resolution on Open Standards

Alliance for Community Media Board of Directors

Whereas, some Alliance for Community Media members and affiliated organizations want to develop the means to share programming and therefore share video files;

Whereas, the ability to share video files across different platforms requires that metadata standards, file format standards, and other standards be created;

Two weeks ago I attended the Open Media Camp in Denver, organized by Denver Open Media. I was representing channelAustin. There are 7 community media centers / stations now part of a network that are collaborating to develop and implement open source tools. One thing we talked about was the need for open standards for video metadata. We want to work with the Open Web Foundation, and are asking them to help create a framework and process for developing open standards for video metadata. It's bit a complicated and is explained here: Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal. If anyone here in Austin is interested in this, or any other aspect of the Open Media Project, please contact me.

I've posted a Open Media Metadata Standards Proposal to the Open Media Project drupal group. This may be of interest to some on this group.

Summary

The following is a proposal from Open Media Camp participants for a process to develop video metadata standards, particularly for video genre types. The proposal is to involve the Open Web Foundation to establish such a process.

The Open Media Project

The Open Media Project was initiated by Denver Open Media in 2008, and is now a collaborative effort with Amherst Community Television, Boston Neighborhood Network, channelAustin, Davis Media Access, Portland Community Media, and Urbana Public Television. The project's mission is to develop and distribute an open source tool set that will enable public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations to work together as user-driven, locally-focused, alternative media networks. Based in Drupal, the project is developing a modular, web-based system that makes local user-generated media more accessible locally and nationally through digital distribution. Leveraging thousands of open-source contributors, the tools are relatively easy and affordable to implement.

Open Media Camp

The Open Media Camp held in Denver, Colorado on April 18 and 19, 2009, brought together Drupal media module developers and implementers, including representatives from all but one of the Open Media Project partner sites. The Drupal developers who attended maintain some of the key media modules. The two-day camp at Denver Open Media's facilities was organized in an "unconference" format. There were sessions focused on metadata standards, video modules, CCK and Views modules, and media management, as well as on topics specifically related to the Open Media Project such as theming and MERCI, the reservation module.

Existing Video Metadata Practices

Public access TV stations, community media centers, community technology centers, and other community media organizations approach video metadata and media genre type standards in a variety of ways. Some centers operate with no standards at all and allow open or free tagging, where users choose their own tags or key word descriptors for their video programs. PegMedia, a media transfer site for PEG (Public, Education, Government) community television stations, with more than 400 stations and producers, only uses open tagging. They have no standards for genre or subject types. Rather than using a pre-defined taxonomy, this bottom-up method of open tagging generates what some call a folksonomy.