MetaVid: Community Video Archive Project

Comment on this project

The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

Metavid is a community legislative video archive project. Its principal participants are Michael Dale, Abram Stern and professor Warren Sack. It was initially a thesis project at university of Santa Cruz CA, and was then funded by sunlight foundation for a year.

The metavid project is working to change the world on a few fronts:
Metavid makes legislative video more accessible so people can keep tabs on their representatives. We capture the full days proceedings and make full stream url accessible/embeddable/downloadable. This brings primary source legislative video footage into online political dialog. This should change the world by democratizing and opening up who decides what legislative video material is relevant. (in contrast to a broadcast model where only cable news corporations have access to private legislative video archives) For a detailed version of the above argument see my thesis paper ;)
All the footage is also made searchable from the text transcripts, who is on the screen and soon will be searchable by other temporal semantic properties (ie: bill debate:=bill name)

MetaVidWiki is open source software based on the same software that runs Wikipedia. This means communities can point metavid at their own dataset and be in full control of the reception of their message. This will change the world by enabling NGOs and tech collectives to take control over the reception of their message. We have not officially launched metavid yet but we already have a few interested parties and at least one full deployment.
MetaVidWiki uses open source video format ogg theora and has developed tools to make it easier to use free and open formats. This ensures video is accessible in free software platforms and ensures there are no patent licensing fees or corporate taxes on audio visual communication. Also see a blog post on why free/open video should be a standard: here

What information will people interact with to make this change?

What information will people interact with to make this change?:

Metavid is working on bringing in many different datasets to texture the online legislative archive. Metavid builds on semantic web technologies to enable high expressive data queries. We have began to import data from maplight, govtracker and the official c-span synced transcripts. For example it should soon be possible to run queries like: Show me clips of Californian representatives who received more than X dollars from companies in category pharmaceutical mentioning the word drugs. These queries automatically become rss feeds that can be syndicated and tracked in web portals like iGoogle or in video rss players like Miro. When combined with an expanding archive of legislative video, metavid should be a powerful data set for participants to interact with.
Additionally it should support the government mash ups community with easy to query relations. So you can convert from govtrack people ids to maplight people ids (for example).

What else have you done in this Cause Area?

I have worked on metavid for around 2 years. Previusly I have did work in social data visualization and other random projects. see cv

http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/feed/

Cause Area:
- Public & Social Benefit
Cause Area Tags:
Project URL:
metavid.ucsc.edu/wiki
Supporting Organization:
Sunlight Foundation
Supporting Organization URL:
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/
Financial support?:
Yes
City:
Santa Cruz
State/Region:
CA
Country:
USA

The Assessment

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?

We need passionate talented people~ doesn't everybody ? ... People with wiki editing experience, people with mashup experience, designers, testers, programmers.

The netSquared project looks like an interesting opportunity to bring on more collaborators. If any "netSquared people" are in interested in helping out the legislative archive project located at metavid.ucsc.edu/wiki that would be most helpful :) We are currently trying to get things ready for wider launch ...a more active initial community could help flesh out the wiki and find software issues.

Other Projects could be stetting up MetaVidWiki instances for different activist or social projects. This could be metavid for your local city council, a community web site to translate/subtitle creative common licensed films, or a community documentary project where participants upload footage and collaborate in creating edits lists with the metavid in browser video editor.