Our (Trans)mission Is To Groove

I just thought I'd add a bit of silliness as the name of an album by a space-disco band I used to know just came to mind..
Perhaps it's the cleaning products and dust that are going to my head! Or perhaps I am floating around on a space-station listening to Grace Jones after all.. that would explain why Andrew, Andy and Agnese are dancing around me, doing the hustle in silver spacesuits.. I definitely have dust on the brain.

Transmission. I'm looking forward mostly to meeting people from other projects and learning about our different approaches to similar challenges. I think we have much to learn from each other, which will help in critiquing our current methods and help us all plan better for the future.

If in addition to this, ongoing collaborations can come out of the gathering, or a network of support can be maintained after it has finished, then I'll be very happy.

The idea of moving towards common platforms may or may not make sense to various projects attending, but I would like to engage in those discussions as there are definitely major advantages to sharing code when we are often developing similar functionality with limited resources for development.

Linking development of multimedia modules to a large open-source content management system has been a way for EngageMedia to both contribute to a large community of users and developers, while benefiting from the huge amount of work that has already been done, and from regular updates on areas of code we would not have the time to develop ourselves. It would be good to get other people's opinions on this as a way forward.

Specifically, I'm also interested in talking about creating an aggregate site of all of our content - this could evolve out of the RSS feeds on the front page of this website. Being able to search for content across all of our databases would be very useful for people looking for progressive content worldwide.

Another outcome I am interested in is documentation - how to work together on common help files and tutorials for web video.

I'm also looking forward to hoovering up a few gigabytes of video from the media server to take with me to screen on my further travels and when I get home! We'll be putting video from the Oceania Indymedia Newsreals for others to come and grab.

Also I'm interested in discussing with our peers all sorts of similar issues we face such as..

The perennial codec question - what formats and codecs should our projects be supporting that currently strike the best balance between ease-of-use/ubiquity and free/open-source software considering that many video producers may be highly skilled in production but may not be particularly net-savvy or familiar with video encoding.

How to improve the usability of our websites in general, and how to facilitate community building by implementing elements of social software. Making sure that we look at the networks and communities that underpin our projects to see how we can reflect the way they organise offline.

Learning how to bring together audiences and screeners with independently produced content without the technology getting in the way.. while helping to facilitate the breakdown of the divide between producers and consumers of media, as is happening everywhere on the web.

Looking at ways of working with individuals, campaign groups and social movements to make the step from information to action more possible.. and many more.

See you all in a few days!

Oh, here are some pictures of some of the posters stuck up around where we have been sleeping at Forte Prenestino. There is a comics festival happening here at the same time as Transmission, so even more of an opportunity to catch some dynamic Italian graphic art! Here is a taste of what you will find at Forte..