Personal Democracy Forum unconference

Just finished a one-hour session at day two of Personal Democracy Forum in New York. Like the unconference setup quite a bit. I was expecting about six or so folks to gather around a table, but 30 people jammed into a conference room to discuss the topic I wrote on the board: Remix Politics channels.

We’re now building a channels capability on Ourmedia that lets people create channels of video, audio and images (I explain channels here). Someone here threw out the term "community mix tape," which is a cool way to think about this. Channels can be playlists of cool media you’ve spotted online, no matter where they reside — but more than just lists, we provide the ability to play the media right on the page. Soon, you’ll be able to embed a video player into your site or blog and pull down any new content featured in a channel.

Dave Winer sat in and played a great role in moving the discussion forward and sharpening the focus of the project. One of the questions that always comes up is, how is this different from YouTube?

We love YouTube and want people to use it. But no commercial entity should own something as important as a presidential election, right? Ourmedia’s Remix Politics channel (which we’ll roll out within three weeks or so) is an open source public-interest projec that will interconnect with a number of citizen media projects that we’ll announce soon.

How is this different from YouTube? Dave asked. In these 9 ways:

1) YouTube restricts your video to 10 minutes. We have no limit.
2) You can’t download video from YouTube (without great effort), it’s all streaming. We support downloads.
3) We’ll allow widgets, logos, branding and other customization features you can’t get on YouTube or other sites.
4) YouTube is strictly video. We include podcasts, images and text uploads as well.
5) YouTube does not support Creative Commons licenses for sharing. We’ll encourage use of Creative Commons licenses.
6) We’ll supply original source material from CSPAN and video footage from political figures.
7) Remixing will be at the heart of what we do. We’ll offer tools and learning materials to help people do this.
8) YouTube is proprietary. We’re open source.
9) This is not a walled-garden destination site. We want you to build channels and embed a player into your site or blog and have a conversation around it.

Yes, upload your videos to YouTube — or Blip.tv or any other site. But don’t stop there. Create a channel, get democratic distribution for it, and become involved in the political process. Much more to come on this.

Cross-posted to Ourmedia.

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.