0:52:07 to 0:53:16( Edit History Discussion )

Ben Moskowitz: The first project of the Open Video Alliance was a big conference, as we mentioned, it was in June of this year. I know a few people here have actually said you were there, George [Chriss] was there, I know. It was a really great event, because it was the first time that a lot of people who where working on this idea of a open–video ecosystem came together under the same roof and discussed all the different issues comprising open video. In many cases that's technology, in other cases it's how the law interacts with the technology, and then in other cases it's just social practice, how people are using video and what it means when people get their hands on cheap camcorders, cheap webcams, cheap software for distributing, and things like that.

0:53:58 to 0:56:01( Edit History Discussion )

Ben Moskowitz: So that's what we work on, and we mostly do community building and events and stuff like that. We'll obviously have another Open Video Conference, which will be really interesting. If you're in New York, it'll be next year, next summer. It's a little ways off, but you should make plans to come because it's really fun. (It's like a festival, it's less of a conference and more a festival.) We're also doing things to spread this idea of open video, and make it a topic of conversation on people's radar, people who aren't necessarily techies or necessarily in the video community. One of the things we're doing, starting this Monday, is launching a contest. We're asking people to make 60-second videos explaining what open video is and why it's important, and the winner will get to go to SWSX Interactive, a full–expenses–paid trip, and some runners-up will get cameras and interesting stuff like that. <Shay David: Are family members eligible?> Employees of Kaltura, Yale, PCF, and Mozilla are unfortunately ineligible as are their family members, but friends aren't ineligible, so if you want to put 60-sec video in you can be really creative. It can just be a web-cam video, it can be an animation, you can do whatever you want. We have some really cool judges too: Jimmy Wales is one of the judges, Mitchell Baker from Mozilla [Foundation] is going to be another judge, it could be a really good opportunity to get your message out there. Tell your friends too! We want to spread this idea of open video. We're also going to be doing meet-ups in select cities—it's still a little hazy, but what we want to do is to get people who are big lighthouses in the community, people who have a lot to say and are respected. People like Jesse Dylan (who's the son of Bob Dylan), who's really outspoken advocate for stuff like net neutrality just for democratizing video. [In] Boston, we're working with Lawrence Lessig. If you're into the social–political dimensions of what it means when more people get their hands on video, go to our website at openvideoalliance.org, follow us, and if you're interested you'll find a lot of stuff really worthwhile.

0:58:18 to 1:00:16( Edit History Discussion )

The other challenge is, "how do you get these communities that haven't talked to each other yet, because everyone's so new, talking to each other?" In that sense it's been very exciting to just show up to conferences across a whole broad range of topics of societal interest and to start this, and to start it in-earnest. The Open Video Conference was the first conference I showed up to (I had one camera there)—unfortunately, there's still a video backlog, so if you are interested in volunteering some of your time I'd be happy to give you lots of video to edit—the 2009 NYC Wiki Conference (Wikipedia/Wikimania, the people that lead those communities, that was here in New York City), then also other conferences, one from a new, non-profit organization called the Open Forum Foundation, they had a whole conference about Congress and it's geared towards essentially re-engineering the basic constituent–representative relationship and deploying web 2.0 technologies into the actual legislative process, to make government work better than it does now (across a whole range of different offices and organizations).

Ben Moskowitz: So OpenMeetings.org uses the MetaVidWiki code base, right?

George Chriss: Yes; one more conference then I'll wrap that up. Then also PublicMediaCamp down in DC, and that's geared towards discussing how non-profit, PBS–style radio stations and media stations will actually interact with this, because they will be one of the first ones active in this space. They have their own challenges, financially or otherwise. There's a lot of interest there.

1:00:52 to 1:02:04( Edit History Discussion )

Anyway, so from there it's brought into this wiki, it is a video wiki, in that all the meetings are available and they playback [in-browser]. The transcripts don't yet exist, and so the challenge is to make the transcripts exist, and that's exactly what OpenMeetings.org is. It's just about growing that project and broadening the conversations.

Ben Moskowitz: I would say that OpenMeetings.org and MetaVid are two really good examples of websites that are lighthousing what you can do with video. In both cases, you have just a wealth of content, hours–and–hours–and–hours of footage, and if there're accompanying transcripts, instead of having to watch 20-40 hrs. of content until you find out what the most interesting things are, you can search the transcripts and find that "oh, this thing that I'm really interested in came in at 13:15" and you can jump to that part or reference that part or just pull that part out if your're interested in in ways that you couldn't if the video was just being served in a black box, and you didn't have all these cool, extensible web 2.0 things attached to them.

1:02:45 to 1:04:31( Edit History Discussion )

Audience: Can I ask a question? The transcription part of it, do you actually have a full transcription of it or just the metadata and keywords figured out? And is that an automatic process, or is somebody transcribing it?
George Chriss: There's a bunch of 'nos' to answer that question. 'No' the transcripts don't exist; 'no' many don't at this point, because I'm the only one that transcribes them thus far; 'yes' the video can be broken into categories so that you can say "this is a 20-minute Q&A;" within that there are clips, "OK, this person is speaking," so it shows a picture of the person; [finally,] "here's a full–text transcription of what they said, including keywords that you can categorize all of this stuff on."
Audience: So how do you get the full–text transcription?
George Chriss: You type very fast.
Audience: That's what I didn't want to hear!
Shay David: There are also tools—one of the purposes of the [Kaltura] app exchange is [the listing of] a company that I think you'll be very excited to meet <Leah Belsky: They can type faster than you!>, that does phonetic indexing that allows you to index and keyword everything. They are basically able to do phonetic searches with a learning matrix, so you would be able to connect them using George's technology with the another technology, and when we've finished launching this it's going to be something that you don't even need to program to be able to do, it's going to be "check the box, give me that, give me that [search capability]." "Press the button." But we're going to come to that.

1:05:06 to 1:06:20( Edit History Discussion )

George Chriss: I'll actually add to that: the largest challenge at this point is availability, in terms of actually having video to start with, the next is discoverability, to actually find these moments of interest, and after that you can talk exciting work like pattern recognition. For example, I can guarantee you that future conversations about environmental sustainability at the local level – you know, they will repeat themselves for local communities and you can start to see patterns and recognize all sorts of cool trends. You can do all sorts of crazy stuff when you think into it. I just saw a newspaper article saying that you can cough into an iPhone, and depending on how you cough, it tells you what kind of disease you have.
Ben Moskowitz: That doesn't seem very reliable!
George Chriss: Well, maybe, maybe not! Based off of statistically–gathered coughs—
Audience: What was the developer thinking‽
George Chriss: I had to chuckle to myself because "if I had a nickle for every time somebody coughed on-video, I could probably do accurate disease prediction."
George Chriss: I think that I've taken up enough time at this point, but if there's any more questions?

1:07:22 to 1:08:46( Edit History Discussion )

Shay David: Absolutely. We have someone working on tools like that. A really good example of this stuff is actually quite successful which is RemixAmerica.org, you can check it out. That's a site that Kaltura has developed for over a year. People for the American Way is a left–wing organization with a right–wing name, it's actually very liberal. Norman [Manasa] owns a copy of the constitution, that's the type of person he is, and rumor is he lost it, like one of the only copies left. He's very into this notion of democratizing media, the notion of "we're losing a whole generation here of people that don't have access to the moon landing or the JFK assassination and Martin Luther King movement" that some of us in this room are old enough to remember. With more and more tools, in the age of the radio, at least that's what we hear from our (grand-)parents, they remember listening to this, and things like the moon landing are very visual experiences. Remix America is a site that takes that and uses classic text, visual text material from American encyclopedias and allow people to remix that. It's interesting to see how people are co-opting it and using it. That summer in Chicago, for example, in a media camp there was a summer camp for people learning film–making, and they used the Remix America's platform as a learning tool. So absolutely yes.

1:10:38 to 1:10:58( Edit History Discussion )

Audience: I know this is a little far–fetched, but with the way a lot of the facial recognition is with pictures today that's just starting, and you're able to tag around the picture, do you think there will be a time when we can tag around items on the video? Soon?