A big part of my thesis project includes researching how community media (PEG access TV) centers are educating their producers, or vice versa, about how to use new media tools for Internet publishing and distribution (using blogs, podcasts, wikis, etc.). So as we go along here I will be pulling together (aggregating) a list of resources not only for my own research but for others interested in the world of Community Media 2.0 (please see the CMR Spring 2007 Issue!):

Here’s a great list of resources that Jason Crow at CCTV has been putting together over the past year, under the category “How to . . .”

How to Make an MPEG2 for Server Playback

“Linked here is a .pdf tutorial I made to help people with making an MPEG2’s for server playback.”

Tagging Conventions for Public Access

“Below is a suggestion for tagging conventions for public, educational and government access:

Thus, a video from Cambridge Community television would be tagged like so: pubaccess ne ma cctvcambridge“

Example Uses of Tagging: The Stories of a Region and State

“Here are some real easy examples of ways to use tags . . . ”

How to Cross Post Videos from Blip.tv . . . Automatically

“From now on you can choose to have your posts to blip.tv cross-posted to your blog by checking off the new ‘cross-post to my blog’ box. You’ll find this checkbox on all of blip.tv’s post forms.”

General Guidelines for Creating a Thumbnail Image

“Most blog posts or videos on-line have a small image that gives a preview of the video. We call these small images ‘thumbnails’ and they are the easiest way to promote the content of your video”

Update Your Video Player Style in Blip.tv

“I noticed many of our bloggers are using the flip style player from blip. Though that does work great and is the default, did you know you can change the style that blip posts your videos on our site?”

iTunes Video Guidelines for the Bandwidth Rich

“Apple released a new gizmo a while back that wirelessly connects your computer to your TV. No more balancing your laptop on the top of your TV with RCA and mini plugs dangling out everywhere.”

Compress for Less $ and Headaches with ViddyUp

“For $9.95, I get a no headaches, great looking video ready for iPod Video player, iTunes, Blip.tv and YouTube.”

Make Internet TV Launched

“You’ve found the ultimate ‘how to…’ of the ‘How to…’ Tutorials blog here with Participatory Culture Foundation’s Make Internet TV website.”

How to Make a Screenshot (Thanks to freevlog!)

“I have been working on creating tutorials for everyone to use. Then I found the “freevlog” blip.tv blog and there are 12 glistening tutorials made by the fantastic Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi at Free Vlog (http://freevlog.org).”

How To Effectively Use Shot Variation in Your Video

“Videos are starting to trickle in for MakeInternetTV.org and we’ve got the latest installment. You’ll find this video in chapter 2.4, Composition & Motion.”

The thing I like best about this Community Media 2.0 Toolkit (above) is it’s homegrown, straight out of Public Access TV. Thanks, Jason!

Over at Austin360.com, the “Entertainment” side of the online Austin-American Statesman in TX, there’s a post titled “Lonelygirl15, Public Access TV and the YouTube revolution” on the Almost Urban blog. It was written by Deborah Sengupta back in March during the annual SXSW festival, where the LonelyGirl15 producers made a panel appearance.

In her post, Sengupta adds that Public Access TV in Austin (PACT) is a great educational resource for the public to use in learning how to make media for distribution on the Internet:

“. . . PACT Austin offers a very reasonably priced TV producer training program. For less than $200, you can learn everything from how to operate a camera to how to edit your work in Final Cut Pro. Not just for conspiracy theorists, it’s actually a great resource for musicians, artists and garden variety soapbox philosophers with a desire to learn how to broadcast. And perhaps, to join the YouTube revolution.”

It’s great to see people in the “blogosphere” making connections about why Public Access TV is important and relevant in an “Age of YouTube”. It’s even more important for community media centers to educate their producers about RSS, tagging and metadata (along with video production training) in order for PEG access TV content to be found, watched and shared alongside the LonelyGirl15’s of the YouTube world.

It would be nice to have a better looking header image for this blog. The image above is something I threw together over the weekend.

If anyone would like to contribute design ideas for this site, you can email them to colin (AT) cmediachange (DOT) net. The dimensions across the top are 780×150.

Jason Daniels set up a wiki as a place for Public Access TV stations to add their RSS feeds. See an earlier post on why this matters.

Here’s the blurb from the wiki:

“Welcome. This space has been created to help folks working in PEG TV and related community media ventures to contribute their RSS feeds. This aggregation of feeds can then be repurposed for the sake of amplifying our collective voices. In more tangible terms - the feeds can be used within the news aggregator module of a drupal cms web page or online video player (like Democracy).”

Bravo!

In the Spring Issue of Community Media Review, Felicia Sullivan writes

“These concepts of freedom, transparency, accessibility, creativity, inclusion and community should sound familiar to those of us working in community media. They are the foundations of much of the work in which we are engaged. Therefore, we owe it to ourselves and to our communities to explore and be open to free and open source software.”

I think there is an exciting opportunity to further explore these common values shared by both the free and open source software and community media movements. I’ve created a new page, titled “Free and Open Source Software” on the Community Media in Transition wiki to examine how the mission of PEG access TV fits within this context. If you are interested in sharing your resources and knowledge for this project, please visit the wiki to get started.

At the end of the article, Felicia writes

“It is not a fluke that so many of the resources detailed in this article have ‘.org’ in their URLs. F/OSS is a stance about what kind of communication culture we want to create. isn’t this what the mission of community media is all about?”

Download the article for free (as in speech) over at CMR.

“Community Media 2.0” on Flickr

There’s so many excellent articles in the Spring Issue of Community Media Review, it’s difficult to know where to begin. For my thesis, the mission of public access TV is the most important part of the project in exploring the present and future of public access media.

But, what does public access media really mean? How is PEG access TV on the web different from other social(able)/participatory media on the web? Does YouTube really = Public Access TV (see earlier post)?

Of course not. But why, exactly?

Here’s what the Issue’s guest editors, Lauren-Glenn Davitian and Kari Peterson have to say (Page 26), with emphasis added:

“No matter what technology we use, community media centers (CMCs) are woven from the dense threads of human relationships. Our primary tool is not the camera or YouTube – it is the stories that each of us tells to make sense of and belong to our local communities.

Storytelling is the traditional role of CMCs. Our networks of producers, volunteers and supporters rely on us to help them frame their stories, tell them for full effect, and figure out how to get the word ‘out there’ to the people who need to hear, understand and take action.”

In the introduction, the editors begin by contextualizing public access media production and distribution within a participatory culture:

“This issue of CMR addresses the questions that arise as we shift from our well-worn ‘TV-centric’ (one-to-many) model to a ‘network-centric’ (many-to-many) model of communications and social influence.

We believe the answers to those questions lie within our deep pockets of community relationships, our ability to help people tell their stories, and our abiding knowledge of media production and distribution tools. ‘Community Media 2.0′ is dedicated to all of the CMCs willing to build on these pillars to ensure public access in their communities, and free speech and open networks for everyone.”

People have written books and articles on the mission of public access TV. I will include them in my research, and I continue to welcome suggestions from those reading this blog. For now, I’m interested in the language being used to connect the mission of Public Access TV to Community Media 2.0.

Here are some key words and phrases I am pulling out from the CMR Issue. Please feel free to add to this list:

Storytelling
Community building
Community empowerment
Media education
Public access
Free speech
Open networks

Maybe this is leading to a chapter title, “Contributions to a Tag Cloud of Public Access Media” . . . Alternately, I could just take a look at the cover.

The image above is (two pages pieced together) from the Spring 2007 Issue of the Community Media Review. Because this image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike 3.0 license, I can post it here on this blog. I can do that because I am giving the image attribution, I’m using it for noncommercial purposes and I’m using the same license for this blog. As a result, I can share it with my online networks. This is why Creative Commons matters for PEG access TV.

But, Creative Commons licenses matter even more when we talk about PEG access broadband video.

Access centers that post videos on their website (or through other web video platforms, see earlier post) and license these videos under CC licenses allow people, like me, to not only share them with my online networks, but (depending on the license) it would allow me to remix them for my own creative purposes.

For example:

Let’s say there was a recent cable franchising hearing in Massachusetts that happened to have something to do with, say, Verizon’s interest in entering the cable marketplace (hypothetically speaking, of course). And let’s just say there were 20 video cameras in the hearing room taping the public proceedings.

So then, if there were 20 different versions of 1 cable franchising hearing at the MA State House (let’s say this happened in June, hypothetically again) and all of these videos were published on the web, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Share Alike 3.0 licenses, then I could remix my own version of the hearing to share with my online networks.

While it is important for an access center to get paid for the resources it uses, I think it’s even more important that videos produced by access centers (and producers) get found, watched and shared. Creative Commons helps to make this possible. The more PEG access TV shares video online, the more relevant it becomes - particularly in a “Web 2.0″ world.

So if you work at a PEG access TV center or happen to be a PEG access producer who is creating video for your community and sharing it on the web, please consider licensing your content under a Creative Commons license. By doing so, I believe it could lead to three possible outcomes:

1. Increase viewership
2. Increase community engagement
3. Increase support for PEG access TV in a “web 2.0″ world

By the way, I’d love to know who created this image above and wrote the copy that goes along with it (pages 24-25 PDF)? It’s fantastic. I’m looking forward to diving into the rest of the issue.

The Spring Issue (Volume 30, Number 1) of Community Media Review is online. The title is “Community Media 2.0” (Download PDF). I’m really looking forward to reading it. Here’s the blurb from the website:

“The ground is shifting beneath us. We are entering a new communications era, an era dubbed by some as ‘web 2.0.’ More content is moving to the internet. ‘On-demand’ media is growing by leaps and bounds. Consumers are spending less time on their couches watching TV and more time on the move with mobile media devices. Anyone with a digital camera can produce and post their own media for a global audience. And, nearly a quarter of the nation’s internet users say they participate in online social networks.

What does all this mean for public access channels and community media centers (CMCs)? This issue of CMR addresses the questions that arise as we shift from our well-worn ‘TV-centric’ (one-to-many) model to a ‘network-centric’ (many-to-many) model of communications and social influence.”

Excellent!

Just a quick word on why RSS (Really Simple Syndication) really matters for PEG access TV centers that are posting (or thinking about posting) their video online.

RSS feeds allow Internet video players (like Democracy) to subscribe to and deliver an access centers’ video to viewers on-demand. This is important because it provides a fairly easy distribution platform (and free as in Democracy: Internet TV) for PEG access TV centers looking to reach an audience on the web. This is also important for people like me who would like to have an easy way to find more access centers’ videos on the web.

I like Democracy because it provides a great way to search, find, and watch PEG access TV videos from centers like WCCA TV and CCTV right alongside other popular programs like NBC Meet the Press with Tim Russert. This is all made possible because these shows have made their RSS feeds available for subscribing to and watching via Internet video platforms like Democracy.

So if you’re at a PEG access TV center that is posting video on the web, please be sure to create an RSS feed for your online video so people (like me) can subscribe to them. If you don’t know how to create an RSS feed for your online video there are plenty of options. I would recommend visiting the “Publish Video” page on the Make Internet TV website. That’s a great place to start.

On May 22 & 23, I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend a conference at Columbia University, titled “Video, Education, and Open Content: Best Practices“. While much of the content was focused around innovative uses of online video technologies in university and public broadcasting environments, there was a hugely missed opportunity to include the PEG access community (particularly those working in educational access) in this conversation. And if we consider new uses of video technologies in education more broadly, I think PEG should have had a much more prominent seat at the table in this discussion of video, education and access to teaching and learning resources within local communities.

One of the main themes of the conference included the question of how educational institutions and other organizations (including public broadcasters) can work to increase access to information and knowledge resources through online video? Increasing access to tools, skills and knowledge lives at the core of PEG TV. Educational access television (and increasingly online) is not just a place to watch school committee hearings, but also a place to find instruction and other educational resources relevant to a local community’s needs.

I will attempt to highlight here some of the conversations from the conference that I think deserve further connection and exploration within this context of video, education, open content and PEG TV.

Peter Brantley (Digital Library Federation) gave an excellent talk about the possibilities of libraries to connect more fully with online networks to provide greater access to resources (including video) for educational use. He started with a simple question, “What does a library actually do?”. It was a great point with which to move forward in understanding how best to utilize library resources for educational use. Here some notes from the end of his talk:

“Libraries can tell stories. A new library is about partnering in a much deeper way with scholars and information technologiies and media creators to find new ways to connect with people in communities. (Goals include to) Engage and make content available.

We’re half way there. Libraries have lots of video content available. But, libraries need advisers from the outside community to help them find ways to make it available.”

It seems to me that folks in PEG access TV, particularly those who are experimenting with new participatory web platforms, could create exciting relationships (if the resources existed) with their local libraries as partners in this quest to increase opportunities for gaining access to knowledge through online video platforms - particularly with regards to local cultural and historical resources.

Peter also added,

“Because video should not be passively consumed. Video can teach. Libraries should deeply engage in understanding how to use video resources to provide educational enrichment for student and faculty.”

As more access centers begin to incorporate new methods for online video distribution, how might we think about connecting metadata from libraries and PEG TV video to increase opportunities for a much more rich online user experience for educational and cultural use?

Other discussions from the conference included challenges of archiving digital video, commercial uses of video and its impact on the law, as well as other big picture views on everyday use of online video.

It was an exciting conference and I again feel privileged to have been invited. My hope for the future is that similar convenings will begin to recognize, with greater depth, the contributions from PEG TV to this discussion of video, education, and open content.