Zoe Young’s short report from Transmission, Forte Prenestino, Roma, June 20006
"Transmission is a gathering of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy. A host of initiatives have sprung up across the globe in recent years that seek to mix media activism with increasing access to broadband, new video encoding advances, content management systems, RSS, p2p and free software. These technologies and projects are converging to democratise access to video distribution on a global level, challenge the dominance of top-down broadcast media and give voice to range of critical social and environmental issues."
Venue:
Forte Prenestino was built in the early 19th century, one of several fortresses created next to the roads into and out of Rome to defend the Vatican and Pope. It was abandoned in the 1950s after airborne warfare made it redundant, and local punks squatted 20 years ago. During the years it has evolved, though there are still some original people living there. It is massive, located in a park in a radical area of Rome known as Cento Celli (One Hundred Cells), covered with vibrant graffiti and divided into 3 levels:
a. Underground tunnels – space for exhibitions eg a Comics Expo at the same time as our meeting,
b. Ground level - workshop spaces, venues, bars, restaurant, offices, infoshop, wholesome food and drink store, music, gym, hacklab, etc.
c. On the roofs and ramparts - private living quarters and gardens, woods, wild flowers, beehives, and space for camping.
As a meeting venue Forte was unsurpassed, allowing free headspace, good partying and hard work, all informed by unexpected interruptions and visitors, excellent food, mutant decor and feral dog politics.
We mainly stayed in gender defined dorms (with three or four times as many bodies – and a proportional volume of snoring – in the male dorm). We met outdoors under a big white roof or in a cool, tunnel shaped ‘pub’, we ate (mainly pasta) from the Forte kitchen, and drank from one of several sporadically open anarcho bars. Most nights there would be some party or other to join when our meetings and screenings were done at nine or ten at night, though some people always stayed late at their screens in the (also tunnel shaped) media lab. Some slept on their keyboards, the organisers had a ‘penthouse suite’ (known as ‘backstage’ because visiting performers would be put up there), and we’d start again at 9.30 or so in the morning. for more info on Forte, see www.forteprenestino.net
Aims:
the aims of the Transmission meeting were to
More info here: http://www.transmission.cc/node/2
Participation:
Around 30 full time participants in the event came mainly from Western Europe but also from North America, Malaysia, Argentina, Korea, Hungary, and of course Australia, the home country of the main organisers Andrew, Anna and Andy of Engagemedia. Their main local contact was Agnese of Candida TV. There was a mix of highly technical code developers, online video project managers, indymedia and other online network types.
For a full list of participating projects see http://www.transmission.cc/wiki/Projects,
For notes on project summaries presented to the meeting see http://www.transmission.cc/wiki/WednesdayNotes
Documentation
We worked in English, though there were language- (and project-)based huddles of Italians and Koreans. Translation into Spanish was somewhat ad hoc and patchy. Where wireless net access made it possible, we typed immediate notes of the meeting into the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) for the event (irc.freenode.net - #transmission.cc). This was intended to provide some written record of the sessions and also to facilitate understanding of diverse accents and speaking styles by people whose first language is not English. Audio from most sessions was also recorded and uploaded to the wiki. For documentation of the sessions see http://www.transmission.cc/wiki/Main_Page
Outcomes:
The real outcomes of the meeting have yet to be discerned, it was more the beginning of a process than a one off event with immediate products. However, for me the most potent new directions were:
1. Building a go-faster network for online social social justice video projects
The chance for related projects to collaborate and evolve away from ‘reinventing wheels’ by all doing the same ‘online publishing’ task and instead evolve towards putting existing ‘wheels’ together to build a functional set of ‘vehicles’ to move forward more effecrively as a community. This involves common projects like sharing software (eg building on the materials in the new ‘NGO in a Box’ CD release), jointly developing documentation and help files in ‘wikibooks’, including shared development of work processes for translation and subtitling, and developing missing technical tools (eg to enable automatic distributed online transcoding of uploaded video into different formats, and to enable different content management systems to ‘talk’ to each other using ‘APIs’, currently in development by a group of Transmission programmers.)
“NGO-in-a-box offers Free and Open Source software (F/OSS), tailored to the needs of NGOs” http://ngoinabox.org/
wikibooks pages on internet video http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Internet_Video,
wikibooks pages on subtitling http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video#Subtitles
2. Sniffing each other and learning to ask the right questions
The space for techies and content creators and networkers to communicate in depth, ‘sniff each other’ in person (Forte is said by one long term associate to be governed by dog politics) and establish greater mutual understanding. The hope is that this will help any new tech tools that are developed to better meet emerging political needs and networks, and help ongoing political processes to feed emerging tech tools with fully networkable and targetted content. For example, I learned that many questions which I was asking to techies were actually needing to be solved at a political level first. So for people in my position the important thing is to work with our existing networks until we are clear and agreed exactly what we want to do as a group, and with what fields of information etc, and only then ask a techie for help. My impression after Transmission is that if we ask for a specific functionality that makes clear sense to them, a friendly techie can probably find some way to help us.
3. Agreeing terms, establishing context and standardising identification for automated media exchange networks to take shape.
A ‘common metadata standard’ could enable more effective media information sharing and aggregation (a). This ideal aims at attaching data fields to online video that contain not only the usual ‘title’, ‘producer’, ‘length’ ‘language’, ‘description’, ‘tags’, ‘license’ etc, but also ‘appropriate use’ (b) and a ‘unique identification code’ for each new piece of media published by participating organisations (c).
a. ‘common metadata standard’
through collaboration between projects represented at Transmission, a group of evolving, regional and/or issue-based online media projects could in theory negotiate and agree on a minimum set of information that any piece of online media should carry with it. This information would allow that piece of media to be searched, categorised and channeled through RSS feeds etc to wherever it wants to be seen/heard. Part of this process would involve negotiating a (non-binding) ‘cloud’ of common subject ‘tags’ to define uploaded media content, tags which would then form the basis for generating issue-based media feeds within and between online video projects and portals.
For example, say FOEI produced a video covering local perspectives and human rights abuse at a protest against the environmental impacts of a World Bank-funded dam project in Uganda. This video could be uploaded using exequo.org, participatoryculture.org’s ‘broadcast machine’ or similar online publishing service, accompanied by a complete set of metadata including subject tags such as ‘human rights’, ‘dam’, ‘World Bank’ ‘Uganda’ etc. Details of such a video and the chance to download it could then, in theory and where appropriate, be channeled via media RSS feed to Witness.org’s new hub for online human rights video, ifiwatch.tv’s portal to video critical of the IFIs, Pampazuka news’ vodcasts on African real world politics, FOEI’s ‘community testimonies’ portal, and anywhere else that chose to feature a feed of information on videos in their issue areas. If however such a video dealt with a similar situation only located in Laos rather than Uganda, info would not automatically flow to Pambazuka news, but instead to Asia247, which features feeds of video reports from the Asian region. And if there were no human rights abuses at the demo, and so the ‘human rights’ box was not ticked in the upload form, Witness.org would not automatically be channeled the media RSS feed, or if the World Bank or other IFI was not backing the project, and the ‘ifi’ field was left blank, ifiwatch.tv would be out of the loop.
For this to happen, all the involved projects would need to be using CMSs that recognised the tags listed above, as well as any others that relate to their work. Their use of these tags would not have to be at all exclusive, each organisation would be free to adopt or abandon any tags they chose, but to channel and receive video automatically they would have to be using a more or less commensurable ‘cloud’ of basic common tags with others in this network. I wonder if other networks are already thinking about doing this? perhaps oneworld tv? I would like to take this idea forward with anyone interested among the networks I’m sending this report to, obviously with help (not least from radical librarians?) if possible!
b. ‘appropriate use’
Some video is not suitable for every audience. It may be material that should only be made available in a targetted way for use as evidence in court cases, or to present to parliamentarians in a quest for accountability. Perhaps it is footage of rape or violence, which could be misused for pornographic purposes or to foment ethnic or other strife. Even peaceful protest footage can be inappropriate to screen if presented out of context. Other material is designed to introduce people new to issues, while more expects a basic understanding of a field. some material could be cynically entertaining about serious issues and therefore alienating to (say) religious audiences, and/or most suitable for educational use. Some reports are roughly cut latest news, not designed to be ‘evergreen’ for long term use, but possible to be recut at a later date into a fuller video or film.
In this context, participants in Transmission decided to create a field in a common metadata standard referring to the appropriate use of the material. This could be an ethical restriction on distribution, or simply advice on how it might best be presented. This advice would be displayed in the first frame of any encoded video that is published online. At the same time, the meeting decided to encourage a culture in emerging web video communities of responsible editing for the web, for example blurring faces where necessary andor using ostentatious time code to ensure that video of contentious events cannot be taken from the net and re-edited to bear false witness. This is a big and important set of issues which deserves more space than I have here, and more discussion than we were able to have at Transmission. Brian Nunez at Witness.org is the main contact for this ongoing discussion since it is a particularly important issue in their work. http://www.transmission.cc/wiki/Notes_from_the_do_no_harm_workshop
c. ‘unique identification code’
An widely recognised ‘identification code’ for each piece of online media would enable content management systems (CMSs) to deal more easily with information about that media. It could be generated automatically by each publishing organisation in the network, and would then facilitate communication between different databases and CMSs. It would be functionally equivalent to a barcode for commercial products. At Transmission the proposal was to create a system for projects participating in the network to adopt a system of identifiers known as FPID, a File Publishing Identifier, (or Forte Prenestino Identifer). Andycat is the contact.
Other exciting projects and ideas emerging from Transmission include
a common aggregating site for all participating projects’ media outputs;
collaboration on trainings for video on the web, including development of the culture of responsibility
collaboration on regional or otherwise themed DVDs combining a range of media outputs from the network;
shared and mutual publicity for our projects in the mainstream media;
and a campaign against official moves in the US to create a ‘two speed internet’ favouring big corporations and government over the people who have made the net what it is today.....
For inspiration, it is worth noting that in Korea, independent online video services such as Jimbonet and Chamseasan regularly distribute material to up to half a million people, and with only two full time staff, Asia 247 is a dynamic force for change in the balance of the media conversation in Asia.