open media project

Hi All,

The Alliance for Community Media NE (http://acm-ne.org/) is meeting in Burlington on the 21st and 22nd (Thurs and Fri next week). Please see http://groups.drupal.org/node/22117 post in the PEGspace group. I was thinking this would be a good chance for a Drupal meeting and for the folks in the ACM to get in touch with some of the folks working in community media in Vermont.

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.

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.

I'm trying to talk to a Princeton B1000 broadcast server with a Linux system. It is acting coyly and doesn't want to play. The B1000 appears to be a locked Linux box.

Anybody have any experience with Granicus? http://www.granicus.com/Streaming-Media-Government.aspx

Can a Drupal based system compete w/ Granicus' economies of scale? Is a Granicus system a good fit for a Public Access station in a small town of 9000 people? Any real life experience stories welcomed.

Thank you.

I'm starting a new thread on Creative Commons that picks up on these comments:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68554
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68578
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68596
http://groups.drupal.org/node/19669#comment-68738

There are several factors to consider in transitioning to using Creative Commons licensing:

1) Current actual practice & historical practice
2) Current policies and procedures
3) Current cablecast contract

channelAustin is pleased to announce it has recently been chosen by Denver Open Media and Civic Pixel as one of 6 public access television / community media centers in the country for a Beta site implementation of their Open Media Project modules. http://groups.drupal.org/open-media-project

channelAustin, http://www.channelaustin.org, is looking for Austin Drupal and CiviCRM developers to join us in this amazing project that will help us integrate the interactive features of the web.

channelAustin is Austin's community TV station located in East Austin at 1143 Northwestern Avenue.

Imagine there is the potential to put some resources into an "Access" theme. What sorts of considerations, ideas, caveats cross your mind? OMP has enough on the plate but John suggested I cross post to here and PEGspace.

Was great to see everyone at the Alliance for Community Media conference. In an effort to improve communication between everyone working on this project, or tools related to this project, Open Flows agreed to host an Open Media group on their SILC (encrypted irc) server. The server is emma.openflows.com, and the channel is #om. There are already a few people living in there and we would love to see as many people available as possible. There are several SILC ready clients, for osx there is colloquy . On Windows Pidgin works (http://www.pidgin.im/).