Outcome of the Transmission Global Online Video Forum

Ourmedia was invited to attend the Transmission Global Online Video Gathering on June 7-10 in Rome, but we couldn’t make it because it was held the same week as Vloggercon. I organized a Citizens Media Summit in San Francisco in May 2005 attended by 36 people, so I’m a softie for these kind of efforts.

Anna Helme, who works with an Australian online video distribution project currently in development called EngageMedia (a site that looks really interesting), did much of the organizing for Transmission. Anna writes:

The Transmission wiki contains mp3 recordings of some sessions.

Here is a photo essay put together by Jerry from Asia247 on his blog.

Some of the proposals made for working together after Transmission can be found here. Mainly they involve making sure we can share and syndicate content, pooling help and tutorials resources, pooling database info such as screening organisations internationally, developing the Transmission network further and attempting to avoid re-inventing the wheel or doubling up on development work.

My own ideas are available as a PDF attached to the bottom of my blog here. It remains to be seen which of these proposals are taken up and put into practice. I think most of us left feeling quite inspired, and knowing more from being able to get inside each others projects for a few days.

Sounds similar in some ways with what we’re trying to do with the Open Media Coalition, only with a greater social justice/political bent.

Here’s Zoe Young’s lengthier report from Transmission:

Transmission is a gathering of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy. A host of initiatives have sprung up across the globe in recent years that seek to mix media activism with increasing access to broadband, new video encoding advances, content management systems, RSS, p2p and free software. These technologies and projects are converging to democratise access to video distribution on a global level, challenge the dominance of top-down broadcast media and give voice to range of critical social and environmental issues.

The aims of the Transmission meeting were to
• increase communication between projects
• build relationships between projects working on different aspects of distribution
• improve knowledge and skills of participants
• assess and compare the current tools and projects in a constructive yet self-critical environment
• investigate possibilities of technical collaboration and consider possibilities of common platforms

More info here

Participation:
Around 30 participants in the event came mainly from Western Europe but also from North America, Malaysia, Argentina, Korea, Hungary, and Australia, the home country of the main organisers Andrew, Anna and Andy of Engagemedia. Their main local contact was Agnese of Candida TV. There was a mix of highly technical code developers, online video project managers, indymedia and other online network types.

For a full list of participating projects see here.

For notes on project summaries presented to the meeting see here.

For documentation of the sessions see the Transmission wiki’s main page.

Outcomes:

The real outcomes of the meeting have yet to be discerned, it was more the beginning of a process than a one-off event with immediate products. However, for me the most potent new directions were:

1. Building a go-faster network for online social social justice video projects

The chance for related projects to collaborate and evolve away from ‘reinventing wheels’ by all doing the same ‘online publishing’ task and instead evolve towards putting existing ‘wheels’ together to build a functional set of ‘vehicles’ to move forward more effectively as a community. This involves common projects like sharing software (eg, building on the materials in the new ‘NGO in a Box’ CD release), jointly developing documentation and help files in ‘wikibooks’, including shared development of work processes for translation and subtitling, and developing missing technical tools (eg, to enable automatic distributed online transcoding of uploaded video into different formats, and to enable different content management systems to ‘talk’ to each other using ‘APIs’, currently in development by a group of Transmission programmers.)

“NGO-in-a-box offers Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGOs” http://ngoinabox.org/
wikibooks pages on internet video http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Internet_Video,
wikibooks pages on subtitling http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Subtitles

2. Learning to ask the right questions …

3. Agreeing on terms, establishing context and standardising identification for automated media exchange networks to take shape.

A ‘common metadata standard’ could enable more effective media information sharing and aggregation (a). This ideal aims at attaching data fields to online video that contain not only the usual ‘title’, ‘producer’, ‘length’ ‘language’, ‘description’, ‘tags’, ‘license’ etc, but also ‘appropriate use’ (b) and a ‘unique identification code’ for each new piece of media published by participating organisations (c).

a. ‘common metadata standard’
through collaboration between projects represented at Transmission, a group of evolving, regional and/or issue-based online media projects could in theory negotiate and agree on a minimum set of information that any piece of online media should carry with it. This information would allow that piece of media to be searched, categorised and channeled through RSS feeds etc to wherever it wants to be seen/heard. Part of this process would involve negotiating a (non-binding) ‘cloud’ of common subject ‘tags’ to define uploaded media content, tags which would then form the basis for generating issue-based media feeds within and between online video projects and portals.

For example, say FOEI produced a video covering local perspectives and human rights abuse at a protest against the environmental impacts of a World Bank-funded dam project in Uganda. This video could be uploaded using exequo.org, participatoryculture.org’s ‘broadcast machine’ or similar online publishing service, accompanied by a complete set of metadata including subject tags such as ‘human rights’, ‘dam’, ‘World Bank’ ‘Uganda’ etc. Details of such a video and the chance to download it could then, in theory and where appropriate, be channeled via media RSS feed to Witness.org’s new hub for online human rights video, ifiwatch.tv’s portal to video critical of the IFIs, Pampazuka news’ vodcasts on African real world politics, FOEI’s ‘community testimonies’ portal, and anywhere else that chose to feature a feed of information on videos in their issue areas. If however such a video dealt with a similar situation only located in Laos rather than Uganda, info would not automatically flow to Pambazuka news, but instead to Asia247, which features feeds of video reports from the Asian region. And if there were no human rights abuses at the demo, and so the ‘human rights’ box was not ticked in the upload form, Witness.org would not automatically be channeled the media RSS feed, or if the World Bank or other IFI was not backing the project, and the ‘ifi’ field was left blank, ifiwatch.tv would be out of the loop.

For this to happen, all the involved projects would need to be using CMSs [content management systems] that recognised the tags listed above, as well as any others that relate to their work. Their use of these tags would not have to be at all exclusive, each organisation would be free to adopt or abandon any tags they chose, but to channel and receive video automatically they would have to be using a more or less commensurable ‘cloud’ of basic common tags with others in this network. I wonder if other networks are already thinking about doing this? perhaps oneworld tv? I would like to take this idea forward with anyone interested among the networks I’m sending this report to, obviously with help (not least from radical librarians?) if possible!

b. ‘appropriate use’
Some video is not suitable for every audience. It may be material that should only be made available in a targetted way for use as evidence in court cases, or to present to parliamentarians in a quest for accountability. Perhaps it is footage of rape or violence, which could be misused for pornographic purposes or to foment ethnic or other strife. Even peaceful protest footage can be inappropriate to screen if presented out of context. Other material is designed to introduce people new to issues, while more expects a basic understanding of a field. some material could be cynically entertaining about serious issues and therefore alienating to (say) religious audiences, and/or most suitable for educational use. Some reports are roughly cut latest news, not designed to be ‘evergreen’ for long term use, but possible to be recut at a later date into a fuller video or film.

In this context, participants in Transmission decided to create a field in a common metadata standard referring to the appropriate use of the material. This could be an ethical restriction on distribution, or simply advice on how it might best be presented. This advice would be displayed in the first frame of any encoded video that is published online. At the same time, the meeting decided to encourage a culture in emerging web video communities of responsible editing for the web, for example blurring faces where necessary andor using ostentatious time code to ensure that video of contentious events cannot be taken from the net and re-edited to bear false witness. This is a big and important set of issues which deserves more space than I have here, and more discussion than we were able to have at Transmission. Brian Nunez at Witness.org is the main contact for this ongoing discussion since it is a particularly important issue in their work.

Notes from the First do no harm workshop

c. ‘unique identification code’
A widely recognised ‘identification code’ for each piece of online media would enable content management systems (CMSs) to deal more easily with information about that media. It could be generated automatically by each publishing organisation in the network, and would then facilitate communication between different databases and CMSs. It would be functionally equivalent to a barcode for commercial products. At Transmission the proposal was to create a system for projects participating in the network to adopt a system of identifiers known as FPID, a File Publishing Identifier, (or Forte Prenestino Identifer). Andycat is the contact.

Other exciting projects and ideas emerging from Transmission include:
• a common aggregating site for all participating projects’ media outputs;
• collaboration on trainings for video on the web, including development of the culture of responsibility
• collaboration on regional or otherwise themed DVDs combining a range of media outputs from the network;
• shared and mutual publicity for our projects in the mainstream media;
• and a campaign against official moves in the US to create a ‘two speed internet’ favouring big corporations and government over the people who have made the net what it is today…..
• For inspiration, it is worth noting that in Korea, independent online video services such as Jimbonet and Chamseasan regularly distribute material to up to half a million people, and with only two full time staff, Asia 247 is a dynamic force for change in the balance of the media conversation in Asia.

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.