[Imc-uk-process] Re: [IMC-Video] Some proposals out of video activism gathering

[and]

Hi Ben,

these are all good ideas and made me think I should really email the 
list about what we, EngageMedia, are doing. <http://engagemedia.org>. 
We produce the oceania indymedia newsreal and as a project are 
specifically focussing on social and environmental justice issues the 
SE Asia, Australia and pacific region. There's not much to the site at 
the moment as we are still in development.

It will be a space for critical documentary, fiction, artistic and 
experimental works from South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific 
region.

We (along with quite a few other developers) are currently working on 
building a content management system for video using plone 
<http://plone.org> that will do a lot of what you mention. We are doing 
this as a side project to Indymedia because we think that such a 
project needs significant funding to be done right. We're using plone 
as a content management foundation rather than one of the Indymedia 
CMS's because it literally has hundreds of developers working on it and 
is in a state of rapid development. Starting this weekend there will be 
a gathering of around 30-40 plone developers in Egg, Austria, many of 
whom will be working for a week on plone's ATvideo product and other 
multimedia applications. 
<http://plone.org/events/sprints/snow-sprint3/> 
<http://plone.org/products/atvideo>. All this is of course is licensed 
under a GPL.

As we are in full swing development we thought we'd better let those 
outside of the Oceania region know about us. One of the key problems at 
the moment with the development of various online video distribution 
tools is a significant amount of doubling up, everyone seems to have 
their own CMS (and we are no exception). However we think that Plone, 
and perhaps the ourmedia.org drupal development, probably provide the 
most possibilities in terms of direction and the capacity to 
collaborate with many groups on a single open source project.

I've responded to a few of your comments below in terms of the 
development
>
> 1. having all uploaded videos automatically transcoded into the most 
> popular mobile video codecs
>     such as 3GP, PSP etc for video capable mobile phones, ipods, psp 
> etc.

Some work has already been done with auto-transcoding to flash in plone 
mostly for web viewing however (using open-source flash code). 
Auto-transcoding to mobile-friendly video is another great idea, one 
which we'd like to be doing too. Auto-transcoding does takes a fair 
wack of CPU so to do this across the board would probably require some 
co-ordination between servers and projects. MMS (mobile) uploading is 
also something we are looking to work on once the basic video 
functionality is all working.
>
> It was discussed that it would be nice to be able to request editable 
> quality footage from people who upload video content to indymedia 
> (either local or ivdn). Additionally it could be very useful for 
> people to be able to contact the videographer in relation to requests 
> for footage that might be used as evidence in court. However if people 
> are not specifically encouraged to leave contact info these 
> opportunities are often lost. It might be that people don't think 
> about the possible importance of people being able to contact them or 
> it might be that they have reason not to want footage directly 
> attributed to them.

Plone allows members to contact other site members without having to 
display their emails. This is already built in as is the ability for 
everyone to have their own members page with specific information about 
themselves, a list of their contributions to the site and the ability 
to customise their page in a host of ways. Of course this means having 
people's emails in the database but those with security concerns can 
always have a separate and specific email/login if they feel they need 
it. Plone also has a free open source "instant messaging" product 
(module) where you can leave messages for registered users of your 
website, in their member's area.

Things like rss 2.0 with enclosures (vodcasting) are also built in to 
Plone so anyone will be able to create their own video channel by 
signing up to the site and publishing a video. You can see some of the 
various proposed features on the roadmap.
<http://plone.org/products/atvideo/roadmap/psc_improvements_listing>

Plone has a huge number of plug-in-able products, and more are being 
created all the time. The multimedia area of this is quite new, but 
moving along fast. <http://plone.org/products/>

Given the pretty large task involved in making all these things happen 
we think it really makes sense for Indymedia software development to 
link up with other projects that might not be closely politically 
aligned but are certainly committed to the ethics of free software.

Building greater co-operation between the current online video 
distribution projects seems to be the first step to making that happen.

Hopefully we'll have a beta up and running soonish for people to play 
with, and see some examples of what we're talking about. We'll let you 
know.

Just wanted to let people know what we're up to, and see if that might 
open up the options for the kinds of functionality you're talking 
about. Anyone who is interested in knowing more or getting involved 
(especially programmers with Python/Plone experience) can email us 
here: contact at engagemedia dot org

</end product promotion> :)

andrew and anna
engagemedia

>

------------------------------
http://engagemedia.org
Forthcoming online channel for social and environmental justice video 
from South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific.