Help us name a new politics channel

Today a few of us met in San Francisco to begin planning the contours of a new online political speech channel for the 2008 election. (Picutred from left, Dave Toole of Outhink, yours truly, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Doug Kaye of the Conversations Network and Morty Wiggins of Outhink.)

The idea is a simple one, though it will take some engineering magic to make it happen:  We see a need to help the public to engage political candidates and elected officials in a conversation around national and local issues leading up to the 2008 U.S. elections.

Toward that end, we will provide free resources, tools and a platform to help citizens to:

• take up the tools of citizen journalism to record candidates’ speeches and interviews;

•  connect with sringers who will capture live events;

• access video footage and audio files — both contemporary and archival — of candidates and elected political figures;

• annotate or remix video and audio to create their own multimedia political commentaries and news reports;

• view examples of citizen journalism and mash-ups relating to politics to see best practices and to inform their own works;

• collaborate with other digital media producers when desired;

• share their works by publishing them.

We won’t announce the project and solicit participation by those interested in the political process until we build some of the basic underpinnings of the channel on Ourmedia in a way that will make it easy to pull in videos and podcasts from other sites as well as to allow people to post channel content on their own blogs and sites.

But we thought it important to be transparent about the process and to solicit your suggestions about what we should call this project. Some of the names tossed into the hat so far (and please add your own) are:

• Remix Politics
• Political Speech
• Ourpolitics
• Read Write Politics
• 2008 Elections
• Citizen Politics
• Take Back Politics
• By the People
• Politalk
• Your nomination (if selected, we’ll credit you on the site)

This will actually be a landing page for a number of different channels, or collections of videos, podcasts and discussion boards (we’ll explain more fully what a website "channel" is in a few weeks once we map out the details). We anticipate that in many cases, people will be able to tag their videos with a name (such as remixpolitics or politicalspeech) and it will automatically show up in the channel.

I’m pretty excited about this project and look forward to making this a broad-based effort that involves bloggers from both the right and the left.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.