Open Video Conf Roundup

Wow! was the only word that can really sum up the Open Video Conference last weekend in New York City. It was an amazing confluence of people from the worlds of online video, art, free culture, open content and web technology. This is not a group that comes together often, but it turns out sparks fly when they do (in a good way).

Photo: Kid Kameleon, CC BY SA NC

Paul Kim, Chris Blizzard, Paul Rouget, Asa Dotzler and myself were all there for Mozilla. Also attending was Sebastian from Daily Motion and number of others working with Mozilla on open video in the run up to FireFox 3.5. We figured that we should post some quick reflections and takeaways. Here we go:

First take away: people who make video are great potential allies. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth talking about. Whether I was talking to Brett Gaylor about user annotations for RIP: A Remix Manifesto or listening to Lauren Cornell talking about online video art, it’s clear that people who make video ‘get’ the potential of <video> becoming a first class citizen of the web. These are the people that really can show what’s possible with open video at the creative level. And they want to do it. The thing is, they’ll need help. There is a real need to reach out and work with video creators on this front.

Second take away: we have a long way to go. The conference provided an opportunity to dig into the practical questions of making open video work — which was a great reminder that there is a ton of work ahead. Despite best efforts, the amazing video feeds from the conference ended up in Flash and not <video> plus Theora (archived versions coming in open video soon). The lively codec panel clarified a number of things, but still left us with more questions than answers (Blizzard to blog on this separately). And, over and over, individual filmmakers expressed a) excitement about open video technology (they love the interactivity it can bring) and b) confusion about where to find good and easy to use tools to start playing with this stuff (there really aren’t any yet). All of these things are solvable, especially if we work with people who make video everyday. But we’re clearly still in very early days with open video.

Third take away: there are some simple things we can do now to build momentum. Everyone was in constant brainstorm mode in NYC. One good and simple idea: develop a campaign or visual element that says ‘this is open video’. Blizzard, Nicholas and I are going thinking this through, and will post again soon. There were also a number of ideas around helping creators use open video, partly through better documentation (Blizzard has some ideas on this) and partly by encouraging people to experiment (PCF and Mozilla announced an open video contest with this in mind). These are tiny first steps, but they are a practical start and a good way to keep the energy from the conference flowing.

Of course, the big take away is that open video is both important and fun. Dean, Elizabeth, Ben and all the volunteers did an AMAZING job organizing an event that showed this. They invited the right mix of people, programmed the right content and threw the right parties. The organizations that backed the event also showed tremendous leadership and prescience — Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, the Yale Information and Society Project and iCommons. All of these people and orgs deserve a huge thank you (I hear clapping!).

Photo: CCLearn, CC BY

Next steps: start doing the small and easy things (open video awareness and documentation), and figure out a way to pick up some of the hard stuff along the way (better codecs, easy tools, deeper connections to the people who make video). The good news is there are alot of people and orgs that want to make it happen, and they are gathering around this idea of an Open Video Alliance (the umbrella for the conference). Good things ahead.

PS. A full video archive of the conference sessions is coming soon. In the meantime, you can see one of the demos that Blizzard and Paul Rouget gave here and Blizzard and my slides here.

Building an open video movement!

Prepping for the Open Video Conference, I’ve been thinking alot about the link between online video and the web. We love the web. We love it because it’s all about transparency, remixability, participation. It’s about creativity and innovation. It’s open. And it’s wonderful.

Sadly, we cannot say these things about online video today. To be sure, have seen a huge explosion of video creativity on the web. And web cams and phones have made video almost like an everyday language. Yet, the legal, distribution and technical underpinnings of online video remain much like television — opaque, immutable and centralized.

It is now time to change this. It’s time to fuse the business of art, storytelling and entertainment with the logic and culture of the web. It’s time to make video a first class citizen on the internet.

Making this happen is partly about technology that makes video as open and bendable as the rest of the web. But it’s also about applying the logic of the web to how we make and distribute moving images. These are the things we need if we want to build world where open, participatory video surrounds us.

If there is an open video movement, this is what it is about. Looking around at all the people here at the Open Video Conference in NYC, it feels like we are here to imagine and start building this movement.

What is open video?

In the world of Mozilla, we often ask ourselves things like: What does an open web look like? What makes the internet better?

The answers are actually quite simple. Transparency. Shared control. The opportunity to participate. The freedom to innovate and remix without asking permission. These are things we see almost everywhere on the internet, so much so that we can sometimes take them for granted.

Yet, these are not things we can take for granted with online video. Videos delivered in Flash and Silverlight are opaque boxes that you can neither see into nor play with using the rest of the web page. The codecs used to create and distribute these video are locked down with patents, making spontaneous innovation almost impossible. The result is a broadcast-like experience dominated by a few big players and with limited kinds of participation. Like television.

Creating video that thinks like the web starts with technology that people can bend, remix and innovate on. This what the native (video) element and Ogg Theora in Firefox 3.5 are about. They are an upgrade for video on the web.

Just think of the basic things these technologies offer. All of a sudden it’s possible to simple things like right click to ’save video as’ that we take for granted with things like images and hyperlinks. More importantly, it possible to create a page where video interacts with other elements in a web page, and where users can interact with the video. There is also the opporuntity to roll up whole new technologies and innovations without asking if it’s okay.

Of course, the real opportunity comes when people start using these technologies to create, distribute and remix videos in new ways. We’re seeing the early wave of this with Daily Motion’s collection of open videos. With Wikipedia’s efforts to let people collaborate on video articles. And with projects like Brett Gaylor’s OpenSourceCinema.org.

Together, these new technologies, content and production experiments start to show us what open video can look like. They show us what we can now build.

What’s at stake?

The stakes are huge and important. We can choose a world of online video that looks like television, or one that looks like the web. These are the options.

The stakes are very clear for anyone who makes anything that vaguely resembles what we used to call ‘movies’ — be they two minute comedy clips or full scale interactive cinema. If the domination of a few distribution channels grows, things are likely to get both more limiting and more expensive. This will be exacerbated things like the increase introduction of higher licensing fees for videos distributed using the MPEG-owned codecs (am I saying this right?) used to distribute most online video today.

Open video is a way for people anyone who makes video to route around these problems, to embrace creativity and to engage with new audiences. The potential is almost unimaginable.

But the stakes are also high for people who use video casually everyday. With webcams and phonecams, video has become like language. We all use it all the time to communicate and to share things we like. In the world, trends like  censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audiences become huge concerns. Open video can help us avoid things like this and preserve the participatory nature of the web.

Of course, most important of all is what is at stake for the web as a whole. The future of online video and the future of the web are interlinked. We are seeing increased centralization and decreased competition in online video. YouTube’s US marketshare is bigger than its 64 biggest competitors combined. This kind of concentration may not matter at all. Or, as the importance of online video grows, it may mean that the diverse business and cultural ecosystem that is the web is at risk. Open video can keep this ecosystem healthy.

The way forward

This is a critical moment in the evolution of the web and online video – we need to make sure we choose the right direction. This is why 500 people have gathered at the Open Video Conference in NYC.

Making sure open video wins means inventing, evangelizing and playing hard on all fronts — technology, content, production methods. There are three things we can do to start:

1. Make it easy and fun for people to make and watch open video. Technology choices matter.
2. Create an explosion of open video content online. We need this to snowball to move the market.
3. Invent new ways of expressing ourselves together with moving images. This is where the fun begins.

No one knows exactly how to do these things. But they are clearly important. And, by the end of these three days, we should have some good scheming done to get us rolling.

Of course, whatever we do here will just be a start. Our colleague David Ascher often says: “Mozilla is not an organization that’s afraid to do things that take a long time.” It’s this attitude that made it possible to successfully take on Internet Explorer and bring standards back to the web. Patience — and an army of passionate, committed people — makes the seemingly impossible into the possible.

We get the sense that the people coming to Open Video Conference aren’t afraid to take on something that will take a long time. We’re taking a first step in building open video on the web. And we’re in it for the long haul.

Moz Service Week: give the gift of an open web

A year ago, I wrote a post entitled ‘The Next Million Mozillians‘. I have been obsessed with the question of how we create new ways for people to get involved in the Mozilla community ever since. I believe this kind of large scale community building is essential if we genuinely want to:

Make openness, participation and distributed decision-making more common experiences in Internet life.

… as we stated in our 2010 goals. If we want people to live, work and play more like the web, we need to give them simple and easy ways to get involved in reaching this goal.

Announced today, Mozilla Service week represents a major step in this direction. The idea is that Mozilla community members will help public benefit organizations by volunteering to do things like:

• Teach a senior citizen how to blog.
• Help a non-profit use social media to reach new supporters.
• Install a wireless network at a school.
• Write an add-on that helps a teacher do her job better.
• Donate hardware for a local computer refurbishing center.

This is an incredible opportunity to do some good in the world — the broad majority of public benefit organizations really need this kind of help. I know as I worked in the non-profit tech space for many years.

Service Week is also important on another level. It invites people to get involved with Mozilla in a concrete way, even if they can’t do things like code, test or localize. It let’s anyone and everyone contribute to the cause of building a better internet. I meet people who want to get involved like this everyday (really!). Service Week is our first significant effort to welcome these people in a big way. I am excited.

The URL to tweet, shout about and click on is: mozillaservice.org. Service Week happens September 14-21, 2009. But you can sign up to volunteer now. And, more importantly, you can tell all you’re friends who’ve wanted to get involved in Mozilla ‘here’s your big chance’.

Which Mozilla blurb works best?

The response was great when I asked people ‘how would you describe Mozilla in one sentence?‘. Over 30 people responded, and other people also contacted me directly with feedback and interest. This was all really helpful.

As the last week’s Wordle image demonstrated, there were a few common words that came up over and over — community, internet, people, open, better, innovation, choice.

Drawing inspiration from all of these ideas plus other core Mozilla mission docs, I went back to the task of playing with boilerplate text we use for press releases and other things. I came up with three fairly different versions:

Take #1 . Mozilla is a global community of people creating a better internet. We build public benefit into the internet by creating free, open source products and technologies that improve the online experience for people everywhere. We work in the open using a highly disciplined, transparent and participatory development process under the umbrella of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. Everything we create is a public asset available for others to use, adapt and improve upon. Join us at www.mozilla.org.

Take #2. Mozilla is a global community of people building a better internet. Together, we create software and spread ideas that foster openness, participation and innovation online. Our work is supported by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit organization headquartered in California. Join us at www.mozilla.org.

Take #3. Mozilla is a public benefit organization that exists to make the internet better. We believe that the internet is an integral part of modern life. It enriches education, communication, business, entertainment and society as a whole. We work with a community of thousands of people around the world to build software and spread ideas that foster openness, participation and innovation online. Join us! www.mozilla.org.

None of these is quite right yet, but it does feel like there are some strong elements emerging. People and Mozilla’s global community. The importance of an open, participatory web. Mozilla’s public benefit nature. These are all simple and obvious ideas but, as I said when I started this thread, a good chunk of the 300 million people who use Firefox don’t associate Mozilla w/ these concepts. We need to work on that.

I’d be interested in hearing which if any of these directions resonate with people. They probably won’t get used for anything exactly as is. But reactions are super helpful in coming up with things we’ll actually use in the end. I’ve created a short survey with this in mind — if you’re interested in this topic, please take 30 seconds to fill out the survey. Also, if you’ve got alternate riffs on the text above, feel free to post them here as a comment.

A word for hack-remix-opportunity-ness?

As I blogged last week, I see huge potential in Mitchell’s list of characteristics that make a ‘better internet’. If we can nail this list, we will have simple, telegraphic way to explain why both Mozilla and the open web matter. We’ll also have a tool to test ‘is this or that innovation making the web better?’ These are both things we need.

In addition to blogging about this concept, I’ve also talked to a bunch of people about it. With all of this conversation, most people agree on three of the four characteristics: transparency; participation; and shared control. There is also a fair bit of resonance with the idea of ‘open’ as the bottom line concept, although some people have suggested other ideas.

The real challenge seems to be coming up with a simple word for the fourth concept. Most people I’ve talked to agree on the essence: the ability to create, remix and innovate without having to ask permission. There are tons of words that get close. Mitchell used ‘opportunity’ (good when you explain it, but not immediately telegraphic to a broad audience). I used ‘hack’ (probably unreclaimable for a broad audience). Other suggestions are words like ‘remixable’, ‘permissive’ and ‘generative’. The more I think and talk, the more I feel like none of these work perfectly.

So, here is today’s question: can you think of a single word that really captures this idea of hack-remix-opportunity-generative-ness? Ideally, this is a word that gets right to the point but isn’t an academic or insider concept. If not, do any of the words that have come out so far feel good enough to you? I know it’s only one word, but it feels like an important one.

PS. I’m still planning to loop back on the Mozilla in One Sentence thread. Probably tomorrow.