Wow, just got out of the Open Media Developers Summit at NYU in Greenwich Village. About 70 developers, filmmakers, citizens media advocates and other creative people came together, exchanged ideas, and agreed to continue the conversation.
Ourmedia received an extraordinarily warm reception there.
I’m in a taxi as I write this (don’t think it’s wired for wifi), but should be able to file from the JetBlue hub at JFK.
Among the people I finally had a chance to meet in person: Clay Shirky (finally!! — especially given the fact that he’s quoted on at least eight pages of “Darknet”), Lucas Gonze (the playlist king — see Webjay), Kent Bye (the Echo Chamber Project, which I blogged about below), Jim Vinson of DivX, Peter van Dyk (MeFeedia), Kenyatta Cheese, and Drazin Pantic. Also was great to see Mary Hodder, Jay Dedman, Ryan Hodson, Elizabeth Osder, and a host of others.
I showed the flag for Ourmedia and reminded folks of the project’s original name — Open Media (open-media.org) — before we changed it when I discovered that “Open Media” was a trademarked term. Also mentioned that I sponsored a Citizens media summit in San Francisco in May that had very similar goals.
I came to this gathering with three goals in mind. One was to look for a CTO for Ourmedia — we’re in the process of getting funded and have a six-figure salary set aside in our 2006 budget for a kick-ass getting-your-hands-dirty-with Drupal tech nerd and open-standards evangelist. So if you know of anyone who fits the bill, send her or him my way.
The second goal was to connect with forward-thinking folks on the open-media front lines of corporate America, and I had some good conversations with reps from Nokia, Reuters, DivX and Yahoo! about how they might be able to support and work with citizens media efforts like Ourmedia.
The third, perhaps most important goal was to explore ways to bring these open media projects together in real terms, both on the development side (code and content) but also with the goal of creating real interoperability between these open media repositories. During the closing summing-up, I cited three opportunities for collaboration between the attendees. And we hope you, dear reader, will also volunteer to hop aboard these projects:
1. Learning Center: One of the key new initiatives dead ahead for Ourmedia is the creation of a digital media learning center and open knowledge base. The idea is simple: Ourmedia has been focused on creating a community space around sharing personal media. Now we want to get involved in helping people create media.
Want to learn how to create a podcast? Boom, here’s a quick tutorial. How about creating a videoblog and getting it syndicated and hooked up to iTunes? We’ll tell you how. Want to learn about digital storytelling? We’ll provide a step-by-step process.
The Learning Center will begin with links to existing efforts in the field, such as vblog and Node101 and FireAnt and other grassroots efforts. We’re currently forming a discussion group and wiki to bring professors and students at educational institutions into the process (we hope Stanford, NYU, USC, Harvard, Duke and others become involved).
We’ll also be calling up experts in various areas (know your mpeg4 codecs? know how to take a great digital photo? we want to hear from you) and calling upon the wisdom of the community in creating user-generated content. Everyone who contributes will be recognized and credited for your contributions (unless you insist on anonymity).
2. Remix Center: I’m passionate about the idea of creating an area for people to come to legally download video, audio and photographs that can be downloaded for remixing. I believe there’s a creative ferment and energy just waiting to explode around this idea. We’ll be collaborating with Creative Commons, Drupal developers, open-source code jockeys, artists, content creators and others in the coming weeks and months to make it happen. If you support Remix Culture, please join our effort.
3. Open registry: Marc Canter and I have been talking for some time about creating a global registry project to interconnect open media repositories, so that users can easily access hundreds of thousands and soon to be millions of grassroots media works — our content, not the inaccessible stuff locked away behind DRM and paid archives.
Charles Nesson, founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has a lofty vision of a Digital Library of Alexandria — and wants to hold a conference or summit next year to start hammering out a game plan for interoperability. Charles wants to help forge a massive mirrored database that interconnects not just citizens media repositories but hundreds of major libraries as well — making nearly all the world’s knowledge available at the click of a mouse. It’s an extraordinary opportunity and challenge.
In the short run, I told the group, let’s begin the journey. Let’s take a few strides down that road by building a modest glue factory so that we can start bonding these repositories (Ourmedia, NowPublic.com, Undergroundfilm.org, etc.) to each other so that users can access personal media and create media jukeboxes and image albums and directories regardless of what servers they’re located on.
Interested in climbing aboard the citizens media bandwagon? It’s still early. Let me know.
There. Not bad for a taxi ride.
Technorati tags: openmediasummit, omds, HonorTagJournalism
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.
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