Draft Proposals for Working Together and Sharing Content

1. Common Aggregation Site
Why? To simplify the browsing and searching of all of our content for our audiences, to cross-promote our content and get it seen by more people and enable greater collaboration
- what would this require each group to produce in order to contribute?
RSS feed with text metadata - what metadata included?
RSS2 with media enclosures - vodcast - what metadata included?
- does it require a new collective to make it?
Use Transmission site as basis of this
Develop over transmission-discuss list or make a sub-collective for developers
Look at Global Voices, are we doubling up?
- what other software functionality do we need to develop or what other software to make use of?
Search across all projects content

2. Common Data Structure
Why? To enable us to share content, opening up the data flows by letting us communicate with each other.
- what kind of projects might we want this to enable data sharing with?
- FOSS CMS friendly
- Vodcast-client friendly
- Also consider: Public Access / Community / Pirate TV
Commercial / Government TV
DVD mail-order
Small-scale DVD/VCD distribution
Mobile/Game Devices
IPTV
Community screenings
Cinema
- how does this define what the common data structure might look like?
- Smallest amount of conversion between one system to another
- Additional metadata added for various projects but maintaining a standard core
- what do commercial and other big projects do that we might learn from, and potentially wish to integrate with?
- Google Video - what is required to be listed in Google Video?
- iTunes Store - what can be gained from knowledge of those data-sharing standards?
- what are some ideas of what the common data structure might include?
- RDF semantic web - SOMA?
- Unique identifier per program

3. Common Database of Screening Groups
Why? We all have contacts of screening groups in our local areas that would be interested in each other's content, sharing these contacts would save lots of doubling-up on research and greatly improve links in our networks
- how could we share our screening contacts?
- Use a common database
- what could we build this database with?
- CiviRM
- Other online-community software allowing feedback through the network (Plone?)

4. Common Codecs and Formats
Why? To simplify the process of encoding video both for our projects and our audiences
- to what extent can we use common codecs?
- Recommend codec standards based on our discussions at Transmission, and adopt them if appropriate for our own projects
- what are some proposals for what these common codecs and standards might be?
- XVID SCREENING DOWNLOAD: VIDEO - 1200 kbps bitrate, xVid codec, AVI format, PAL/NTSC Resolution and Frame Rate, AUDIO 128kbps bitrate audio, lame mp3 codec
- THEORA SCREENING DOWNLOAD: VIDEO - 1200 kbps bitrate, Theora codec, OGG format, PAL/NTSC Resolution and Frame Rate, AUDIO 128 kbps bitrate audio, Vorbis codec
- FLASH WEB PREVIEW: VIDEO - 300 kbps bitrate, vp6 codec, FLV format, 320x240 Resolution, 15fps Frame Rate, AUDIO 64kbps bitrate, AAC codec...?
- what kind of applications could we design to help end users adhere to this standard?
- One-button GUI for mencoder to produce standard output video for your project, downloadable as a cross- platform binary package
- Transcoder/Uploader client to produce standard output video, attach inputted metadata including CC license as XML and in the video file, and upload to your online archive
- Simple documentation available for people to encode using popular applications

5. Ongoing Platform Design Research and Feedback
Why? If it is too much to think we could work on the same codebase, we can look for other ways to avoid doubling-up in our work, and for supporting each other
- what considerations should we have in mind for future development of our video-sharing platforms?
- Effectiveness socially and politically - working with social movements and campaigns rather than making tech that is fun for us to play with but not so useful
- Scalability - how many people can we reach with our systems?
- Targets - are we reaching our target audiences if a mass distribution is not the aim?
- Usability - major consideration for something as technical as Internet video, keep it simple
- Sharing - how content can be syndicated across other sites
- Convergence - how to make our media easy to move across mediums and devices
- Cost-efficiency - how to keep costs down
- Sustainability - how to maintain developer and editorial collectives by better software and systems design
- how can we maintain a supportive network for sharing information and constructive criticism of our approaches to distributing video online for social change?
- Communicate with, inform and help each other
- what would this network entail?
- Email list
- Wiki
- Gatherings

6. Democracy Player
Why? The best implementation for our purposes of a vodcast/bittorrent/player client that is intuitive and makes it simple for audiences to view our content in a tv-like way
- what do we all need for our content to be Democracy-Player-optimised?
- Holmes...?
- what can Participatory Culture do to work better with our networks?
- Package of Democracy Player bundled with pre-loaded feeds from our projects
- Feedback mechanism between our groups and Participatory Culture - email