Open Media: The Open Source Media Project

For the past few weeks, Marc Canter and I have been working on a new project called Open Media: The Open Source Media Project. It's time to go public.

The idea behind the Open Media project came from a confluence of two things:

- I gave a presentation at the Digital Storytelling Festival in Sedona, Ariz., in June and proposed the creation of a permanent repository for the visual Web, with digital stories as a logical first media form for inclusion. The week before the festival, I got buy-in from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who offered free storage and free bandwidth, "forever," for the project. I registered the domain name open-media.org.

- Long before that, Marc Canter has been touting the notion of open standards, open platforms, open media. He explains the idea in a posting today. I cornered Marc at Supernova in June, mentioned the project, and he immediately jumped in with both feet.

Marc puts it succinctly today: "Basically we're making sure to make it REAL easy for folks to utilize media in their everyday lives, school and work." The goal of Open Media, really, is to foster "a Creative Commons pool of media."

Here's the somewhat more long-winded Mission Statement I scratched out:

We are in the midst of the greatest boon in grassroots creativity in ages. Tools once available only to a professional elite are now being taken up by everyday citizens. Just as weblogs brought millions of people into the media ecosystem, so too are new tools empowering individuals to create video, audio, playlists, and other works of personal media and to share them with a global audience.

The personal media revolution is turning visual. Digital stories, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, fan films, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films — all kinds of short multimedia works have begun to flower. Alas, the most compelling ones are scattered across the Web or hidden away on thousands of PCs, laptops and closed networks. These works deserve a wider audience.

Open-Media.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video). Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action. Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative.

Open Media is three things in one:

• an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop;

• a destination Web site, to launch soon at www.open-media.org;

• eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, semi-professional, and professional visual works and other media.

Unlike other initiatives that are pure-play stand-alone Web sites, Open Media's vision is to bring personal media to millions of desktops through playlists, video jukeboxes, visual albums, and built-in media libraries. Ther epository will run the gamut from Creative Commons-licensed works to public domain works to fully copyrighted works.

Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive are supporting this project with free storage and bandwidth for grassroots video works. Why a visual repository? Open-Media.org will serve as a central resource to bring grassroots video under one umbrella; it will serve as a learning toolkit on how to create rich and compelling works; it will serve as a community space; and it will serve as an archive so that these works are preserved for the ages. For those who grant permission, it will also serve as a clearinghouse that allows others to search for video, download it, and reuse or remix it, with proper attribution.

Supporting this project are thought leaders in the creative community, technologists, educators, and digital-preservation librarians. Rather than relying on a paid staff, the goal is to build a do-it-yourself platform that lets users anywhere in the world upload material, download shareable media, rank their favorite works, and offer commentary and tutorials. All for free.

Over time, we expect Open-Media.org to grow into the world's largest repository of home-brew media.

Marc and I brought up Open Media at the AlwaysOn conference last month, and promised a public unveiling of the proposal. So here it is.

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext was kind enough to set us up with a private wiki last week so that invited participants can begin hammering out schemas, APIs and UIs. If you're interested in joining, just let me know. In the weeks and months ahead, we hope to enlist thought leaders and key players in the technology, creative, legal, education, and library communities. Creative Commons and the Internet Archive will play indispensable roles in the effort.

We still have a lot to do, and it's too early to say where all this is heading. I hope it plays a part in helping to kick-start the visual Web.