NetSquared recently followed up with the N2Y3 Featured Projects to develop these short case studies, with the goal to expand the knowledgebase of best practices for applying social media in the nonprofit context. We interviewed participants from the N2Y3 Featured Project teams to gain a better understanding of the way they used social media to increase their reach and carry out their missions. We are very happy to bring you their stories!

Today's spotlight: Metavid!

Project Details:

• Name of Organization:  Metavid
• URL:  http://www.metavid.org
• Location: Santa Cruz, California

Project description:

Metavid is a community driven archive of public domain legislative video. Developed as an extension for MediaWiki, Metavid makes video searchable across a series of vectors (text, speakers name, category) and enables users to annotate, embed and categorize sections of video. This distributes and democratizes the somewhat formidable challenge of finding what's important and relevant.    

Social media tool or tactic used:

Wiki

How was it used?:  

Metavid extended MediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki to allow them to create transcript (what is spoken) and annotation (who is speaking? about what bill?) layers for temporal data.  This allowed us to search video using both scraped and user contributed content.  For example, before debate begins, each proceeding begins with an opening prayer, followed by the pledge of allegience.  By applying temporal category tags to the opening prayers, it exposes these prayers to advanced searches such as "show me prayers that mention iraq".  

The same can be applied to debate around particular topics ([[Category: Iraq War]]  [[Category: Financial Bailout]], etc.), bills and structural events.  Apply image analysis (OCR, etc.) allows us to scrape the speakers names from the video, which enables queries ranging from the simple, "Show me all of John McCain's speeches" to  the complex, "Show me all speeches by John McCain from 2007 in category [[Iraq War Debate]]which contain the word 'torture'."

Outcome:

It's an ongoing process.    Since NetSquared Metavid has implemented some major UI changes to increase the usability of the site in collaboration with the Participatory Culture Foundation.  They're overhauling our capture system, and hope to extend our content set to committtees.  As the site has grown they've picked up some partners who are syndicating our content into new contexts (Washington Post via Apture).  

Lessons learned:

• However long you think it will take to accomplish a goal -- double it.  If it involves video, double it again.  
• Always keep up with the various open source projects that your project has imlemented. It's also important to keep an eye on the ones you've rejected too.  You never know when one might suddenly grow into a viable replacement, or a perfect fit.

For more information:

• See the full list of N2Y3 Featured Projects here.    
• Read all of the N2Y3 Case Studies as they are published.

The work to create this case study series was funded by a grant from the Packard Foundation.