The Tides Foundation is now accepting nominations for this year’s Pizzigati Prize. The Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest annually awards a $10,000 cash grant to one individual who has created or led an effort to create an open source software product of significant value to the nonprofit sector and movements for social change.

The 2012 winner will be announced in April at the Nonprofit Technology Network annual conference in San Francisco. Each year, starting in 2006, the Pizzigati Prize has accepted nominations for talented and creative individuals who develop open source software products that demonstrate impressive value to the nonprofit sector. Tides welcomes nominations from both developers and the nonprofits who work with them.

Earlier this year I had the honour of picking up the Pizzigati Prize in Washington DC on behalf of everyone at FrontlineSMS. According to the Pizzigati jury, we’d managed to:

create software that speaks directly to the reality that millions of people globally have only simple mobile phones and no access whatsoever to the Internet. The software they developed turns mobile phones into grassroots organizing tools for everything from mobilizing young voters to thwarting thieving commodity traders.

The 2010 Pizzigati Prize winner, Yaw Anokwa, led the development on Open Data Kit, a modular set of tools that’s helping nonprofits the world over on a wide variety of battlefronts, from struggles to prevent deforestation to campaigns against human rights violations.

“Open source software developers like these fill an indispensable role”, explained Tides Chief of Staff Joseph Mouzon, a Pizzigati Prize judge and the former Executive Director of Nonprofit Services for Network for Good. “The Pizzigati Prize aims to honor that contribution – and encourage programmers to engage their talents in the ongoing struggle for social change”.

The Pizzigati Prize honors the brief life of Tony Pizzigati, an early advocate of open source computing. Born in 1971, Tony spent his college years at MIT, where he worked at the world-famous MIT Media Lab. Tony died in 1995, in an auto accident on his way to work in Silicon Valley.

Full details on the Pizzigati Prize, the largest annual award in public interest computing, are available online.

Please nominate, share or enter as appropriate. Good luck!

The post Rewarding open source for social good appeared first on Socialbrite.

Social Actions moves the open source ball forward for the cause community

Guest post by Amy Sample Ward
amysampleward.org

I’ve followed and supported the work of Peter Deitz and Social Actions ever since hearing about his passion and ideas a few years ago. There’s a lot happening with Social Actions right now, but one bit of news is really exciting and needs to be highlighted: some incredibly important technical enhancements have recently been made to the Social Actions API. (Here’s what an API is.) Earlier this week, I got ahold of Peter to get the full scoop! Here’s our exchange:

Let’s start at the beginning: What is Social Actions and where does the API come in?

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60-plus different sources. That’s today. A few years ago, microphilanthropy had just a handful of pioneering platforms.

The Social Actions project began in 2006. I wanted to make some kind of contribution to the world of microphilanthropy. My intent was to inventory every interesting action I came across to make it easier for people to engage in the causes they cared about. There wasn’t much scalability in the way I was pursuing the project.

In 2007, I realized that a much more effective way to aggregate interesting actions would be to subscribe to RSS feeds from trusted sources. I wrote about the potential for aggregating RSS feeds of giving opportunities in a blog post called, Why We Need Group Fundraising RSS Feeds. Three months later I had a prototype platform aggregating actions from RSS feeds, with a search element around that content.

Around  the time of the Nonprofit Technology Network’s 2008 NTC conference, an even brighter lightbulb went on. I remember sitting in a session by Kurt Voelker of ForumOne Communications, Tompkins Spann of Convio, and Jeremy Carbaugh of The Sunlight Foundation. They were talking about APIs. (API stands for Application Programming Interface, and refers broadly to the way one piece of software or dataset communicates with another.) In fact, the name of the session was “APIs for Beginners.”

I knew I wanted to be in the session even without really knowing why. It was there that I realized my RSS-based process for aggregating actions could be so much more with a robust distribution component. I wrote a blog post called, Mashups, Open APIs, and the Future of Collaboration in the Nonprofit Tech Sector. I left that session knowing exactly the direction I wanted to take Social Actions.

And what would you describe as the purpose of Social Actions’ API?

There’s a groundswell of interest, on the part of “non-nonprofit professionals,” to engage with social movements and causes. It’s well-documented at this point that people are hungry to engage with causes they care about in various forms.

The premise behind Social Actions is that there are enough actions floating around on the Web that nonprofits produce, but that they’re not linked up properly or adequately syndicated. There are a million opportunities to take action on a cause you care about, but it’s not easy to find them. The Social Actions API attempts to address the distribution and syndication challenge while also encouraging nonprofits to make their actions more readily available.

What were the limitations that Social Actions and its API were hitting up against before the recent updates?

We have encountered a number of challenges over the years. Originally, adding actions manually was difficult. That challenge was resolved by creating a platform that used RSS feeds to pull in opportunities, which in turn evolved into the Social Actions API, allowing people to access the full dataset from any application that connected to it.

The vast majority of applications that have been built since 2008 match actions with related content: for example, by reading a blog post and searching the Social Actions dataset for related actions. The quality of the search results were limited by our querying capabilities and relevancy ranking. The results we were able to produce didn’t reflect the full contents of our database. They tended to reflect only the most recently added actions, not the most relevant. As a result, we weren’t equipping developers with a platform that allowed for more accurate location- and issue-based searches. Until the recent enhancements, producing the best possible search results for a given phrase or keyword was the biggest challenge.

What did the recent updates accomplish, and how did the opportunity to make them come about?

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.

The enhancements effectively put Social Actions back on the cutting edge of social technology. These were changes that we had wanted to make for a long time. In spring 2009, we were approached by a group that was building an advanced video + action platform and that wanted to draw on the Social Actions API. Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.

Link TV, along with Doug Puchanski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point. It has been incredibly exciting to see how open source projects like Social Actions tend to grow in fits and bursts, depending on the demands and resources made available by users.

What do “Semantic Analysis” and “Natural Language Processing” mean, and how do they make the Social Actions API better?

Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing both have to do with the process of identifying the meaning of a collection of words together. Semantic analysis, for example, can help to identify the meaning of a phrase like “poverty relief” as distinct from what “poverty” and “relief” mean independently. The Social Actions API now uses a tool called Zemanta to apply these processes when searching the actions contained in the dataset. As a result, we can say with more confidence what an action is about and where it is taking place. When searching for the phrase “poverty relief,” for example, not only are the search results more accurate, but Zemanta helps us to identify other actions that might not in fact use that phrase but are nonetheless linked in meaning to it. It’s a difficult concept to explain, but hopefully this makes sense.

And what does “Linked Open Data” refer to?

Just like in 2008 when I had an “aha moment” about APIs, in June 2009 I had an “aha moment” about Linked Open Data. I was presenting Social Actions at the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech), describing how Social Actions was an open database and how we encouraged developers to build open source applications that distributed this data widely. Ivan Herman from W3C listened to the presentation asked, “Why are you building something that’s so closed? Why aren’t you publishing this data in RDF?”

I was surprised, to the say least. Defeated, in fact. I had spent close to three years trying to build this open platform only to have someone more tech-savvy than me explain that what we had built was in fact still a closed platform. It turns out I was at the epicenter of the Linked Open Data community. Their mission is to link the world’s knowledge in the same way that all of the world’s web pages have been linked to one another.

If you can imagine that today the web is a collection of links between pages, the web of tomorrow (proposed by these folks and Tim Berners-Lee) will be a collection of links between discrete bits of knowledge or datasets. Anyone will be able to follow the connection that’s been made between one repository of data and another the same way people can now hyperlink between one web page and another.

Linked Open Data essentially refers to building connections between these repositories in a standard format not unlike HTML and hypertext.

What role do APIs, and the people who build them, play in Linked Open Data?

The stewards of databases are no longer just asked to open up their datasets but to make them available in such a way that they link with other data repositories by design. In the case of Social Actions, Ivan from the Wc3 was effectively saying, “It’s great you have all of this data on actions people can take, but what are you doing to link that data with other datasets? What are you doing to help people make the connection between ‘poverty relief’ as an issue, for example, and existing data sets on the prevalence of poverty in a specific location?”

The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

You can see examples of this at http://search.socialactions.com. Search for any phrase. Below each result you’ll see a link to “Entities.”

Can you tell me more about what ViewChange has done?

ViewChange is an example of an application that queries our actions using Freebase and DBPedia URIs as well as traditional keywords and phrases. The application says to Social Actions, “Show me everything that matches this URI.” The same query is submitted to the Social Actions API as is submitted to any data repository – news articles, videos, blog posts, etc. It’s truly commendable that Link TV, through the ViewChange project, has driven these enhancements on our platform.

A lot is also owed to Doug Puchalski, a programmer with Definition who helped lead the development of ViewChange.

To you, what might the future look like for people who want to take action on the causes they care about?

The technology exists for us to do really amazing things when it comes to matching people with actions they can take to make a difference. The technology itself is advancing, opening up more possibilities for even smarter applications.

The future of social technology, specifically creative implementations of the Social Actions API and similar open source platforms, is very exciting provided nonprofits and foundations continue to make rich data available and link it up with other repositories in the way I’ve attempted to describe. The future is also very bright if we continue to experiment with how these linked data repositories can be deployed for forms of community engagement that we would not have thought possible a few years ago.

If everything goes incredibly well in the coming years, what might emerge is ubiquitous infrastructure of enabling technology and complementary applications that continuously present individuals with meaningful and relevant opportunities to enact change.

The Social Actions API – a pioneering open source project since 2008 – continues its boundary-pushing agenda by embracing the semantic Web and contributing to the Linked Open Data cloud, encouraging the sector as a whole to leverage open source software and linked data for greater impact.

Visit socialactions.com today to learn more!

Cross-posted from Amy Sample Ward’s blog.

Related

• Social actions toolset (Socialbrite)

• Social Actions: Toward a philanthropic Web (Socialbrite)

• How open standards can benefit nonprofit tech (Socialbrite)

• A new open database about social entrepreneurs (Socialbrite)

• All for Good: A Craigslist for service (Socialbrite)

• Making social causes actionable (JD Lasica’s 2008 interview with Peter — Archive.org)

The post Want to take action on a cause? The road ahead just got easier appeared first on Socialbrite.

Last year Socialbrite contributed an open source plug-in to the WordPress community called WP-License Plugin Reloaded — a way for bloggers to assign different Creative Commons licenses to each of their blog posts.

Today we’re proud to announce that our developer David R. Davis has released the first Tweet Button for WordPress. It’s an option for Web publishers to count retweets and let their readers easily share content. WordPress.org approved it early today and granted subversion access (if you’re a coder, you know that’s pretty cool).

For years, you’ve probably seen those green Tweet This buttons (see left) accompanying blog posts, including on Socialbrite. That’s the Tweetmeme button, with some 750 million daily retweet button impressions. As Mashable reports, Twitter itself has now released its own Official Twitter Tweet Button (see the video above). Twitter decided this one of the functions that it can provide better than a third-party developer.

What the video above doesn’t say is that if you want easy integration for WordPress blogs, you don’t need to mess with code, you can just add our new Tweet Button Plug-in. Click here:

Features

The plug-in provides a live count of how many times your post/page has been retweeted throughout Twitter.

• Live count of tweets from Twitter
• Allows you to change the source which you retweet, E.g. “RT @yourname “
• Easily installation and customisation
• Quicker loading times for the buttons
• Better integration, allowing custom titles, hashtags
• Integrates with WordPress MU

One wrinkle

If you’ve been using the Tweetmeme button on your blog up until now and are thinking of switching over to the official Twitter Tweet Button, there’s only one wrinkle: Any posts before July 2010 — when Twitter implemented this — will not show any retweets. You’ll notice that on all Socialbrite posts from June and before. Like Mashable, we decided to take the plunge today and switch over — see the bottom of this post.

Nice, work, David!

The post Get the new Tweet Button for WordPress Plug-in appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Social change organizations, nonprofits, developers, open source advocates, educators. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Nathan Freitas

Here are five social tools I use on a regular basis as a mobile technology enthusiast and developer. Many of these deserve wider exposure to the social change community:

Redmine: Open source project management

1Get your project and team organized with Redmine, an open-source “Basecamp on Steroids” solution you can host in any Ruby on Rails environment. The service has tons of plug-ins, themes and a deep set of administrative options.

Appmakr: Build an app for your cause

2SMS campaigns are so 2008. Anyone can build an iPhone app for their cause using Appmakr, a Web-based, configuration driven service. Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, Beth Kanter and Newsweek are among those who’ve used Appmakr to build lightweight apps for the iPhone.

Mayfirst/People Link: Building a just world

3Pry yourself away from Google and move your email and hosting to a geeky, movement-oriented cooperative based in Sunset Park (Brooklyn), NY, that will fight Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices, provide you with a secure OpenID and “teach you how to fish,” so to speak. MF/PL is an organization that redefines the concept of Internet Service Provider in a collective, progressive and collaborative way.

Drop.io: Free, anonymous file sharing

4Drop.io offers free, anonymous file sharing that’s quick, easy and temporary, with support for text chat, conference calls, phone-based audio recording and even fax! A great resource for collecting and distributing media from one to one or many to many.

Pbxes: Open-source calling & conferencing

5Set up your own private Skype using open-source software and protocols. PBXes supports VPNs, Win/Mac/Linux, Android, iPhone — any SIP device, including support for audio and video conferencing, as well as making regular old telephone calls. They offer free and premium options.

In this series

• Change-makers share 10 of their favorite tools

• An educator’s 5 top tools for social change

• 6 productivity tools for social change

• A change agent’s top 5 tools for social change

• 12 open source tools you should be using

• Top 5 tools for the entrepreneurial journalist

The post A developer’s 5 favorite social tools appeared first on Socialbrite.

Programs powered by coders’ collective brainpower & generosity

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, foundations, businesses, individuals. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

By Kim Bale
Socialbrite staff

Afew years ago, most of us relied on closed, proprietary software to create documents, crunch numbers, surf the Web or watch videos. Today the landscape has shifted dramatically, with tens of millions of people taking advantage of free open source software that’s equal to — and often superior to — tools created the old way.

Some of the most useful, reliable and productive Web programs were developed using open source methods — transparency, collaboration, peer review and testing — resulting in screaming-cool products that keep getting better. Many of the open source tools outlined below are distributed under the GPL (GNU General Public License), making them flexible, high-quality products that give their corporate competitors a run for the money at a fraction of the cost. A few were even developed by foundations.

Here are 12 open source tools your organization should consider using and supporting. How many of them do you know about? (Know about others? Recommend them in the comments below.)

Office tools

OpenOffice: Full-featured productivity suite

1A single piece of full-featured software that will fulfill all of your administrative needs, OpenOffice.org is a nonprofit’s dream. The package boasts a word processor, spreadsheets, graphics programs and database access from any connected computer. The main benefit of OpenOffice is its interoperability — open and save Word docs, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint documents, etc., even if you don’t own Microsoft Office. Compatible with the Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, Sun Solaris and Apple Mac operating systems, OpenOffice is a one-click install and comes with an international community of users. Anyone can suggest improvements, report possible bugs or help troubleshoot problems via the organization’s wiki page. Download OpenOffice.org.

Constituent management

CiviCRM: Manage your connections

2CiviCRM is a free, open source solution for the civic sector that lets you manage your constituents. Far more than a contacts database, Web-based CiviCRM is designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups. See this 4-minute explanatory video on Vimeo.

CiviCRM is a contacts, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Track and execute donations, transactions, conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one place. CiviCRM was created by CiviCRM LLC, the nonprofit Social Source Foundation and the open source community. See this page about which content management systems are supported.

Audio-visual tools

Miro: Watch Web video in high-def

3Streaming your videos is free and easy with the Miro Video Player. A project of the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro is free to download and allows users to watch video in full-screen HD from anywhere, regardless of Internet connectivity. Once downloaded, Miro plays host to HD content gathered from sites like YouTube and Blip.tv as well as podcasts and torrent files. Users subscribe to channels and feeds in their video player, allowing downloads to happen automatically as soon as new content is available.

Miro is great for nonprofits because it offers a customizable player allowing any organization to co-brand their video players and blast them to the expanding Miro community — the player was downloaded about 4 million times over the past year and boasts hundreds of thousands of users each month. As an open-source program, Miro is run by a mere 10 staff members, leaving much of the translating, coding, fixes and upgrades to volunteers around the world. Download the Miro Video Player.

A related free tool is Miro Video Converter, an amazing downloadable app that converts almost any video to MP4, WebM (vp8), Ogg Theora, or for Android, iPhone and more.

Audacity: A complete sound editing suite

4Audacity is a free audio editor that makes it easy for anyone to record, convert, import, export, edit and mix audio files of many formats. The simple Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete options make it very user-friendly and the Undo/Redo options quickly correct any errors. Audacity allows users to layer music beneath dialogue for a professional-quality podcast and features effects that can change the pitch or tempo of the recording, remove any background noise and add sound effects, like an echo. The open-source Audacity Wiki Tutorials can be edited by any user and helps answer questions like how to export projects into iTunes and record audio that’s playing on your computer. Download Audacity.

Songbird: Take control of your music

5This open source media player combines the best of iTunes, YouTube and Pandora to give you an immersive audio-visual experience. Songbird lets you buy and download your favorite music, provides video, photos, news and bios related to each song you play, suggests music you might enjoy and allows you to create and manage playlists that can be downloaded to your synced mobile device. Users are encouraged to aid in the development by uploading add-ons and submitting code. Download Songbird. (Image of songbird at left isn’t related to Songbird site — we just loved the little guy!)

VLC Media Player: A cross-platform media player

6This open-source media player has cross-platform capabilities and is very easy to use. One simple, free installation will leave you a player that can read DVDs, Audio CDs, QuickTime files and more. VLC is ideal for playing video or audio files that are unrecognizable to programs like Windows Media Player or QuickTime, and it has the ability to play damaged files by simply skipping over the damaged parts. Download VLC Media Player.

HandBrake: Rip your DVD collection

7The HandBrake DVD converter can take any DVD or DVD-like source and generate files output as MP4, H.264, Theora video, MKV and several audio options. Chapter selection, subtitles and other features are maintained even after the media has been converted, giving you a DVD quality file fit for any website, computer or iPod. Notably, HandBrake lets you rip copy-protected DVDs you own so you can travel much lighter. See the HandBrake wiki to ask questions of its strong support community. Download HandBrake.

Web browsing tools

Firefox: The Web at your fingertips

8Mozilla Firefox is the second most popular web browser in the world and is a model open-source product. It’s easy to download and runs on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. Mozilla is constantly rolling out new versions of Firefox, and its current version, Firefox 3.6, has racked up more than 121 million downloads. Users can join the community, report bugs, suggest upgrades and create and contribute to the more than 6,000 add-ons that make the browser customizable for you or your team. Current add-ons make it possible to aggregate your social network updates into one app, raise money for charities simply by browsing the Web (Better The World Fundraising Sidebar), create blog posts, manage Delicious bookmarks and more. Download Mozilla Firefox.

Flock: Manage your social network

9If your organizations is interested in beefing up your social media presence, consider Flock, an open source browser often overshadowed by Firefox but one that offers different strengths. Powered by the same platform and technology developed by Mozilla, Flock allows you to update your social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, from any site on the Web. With Flock, you can instantly share links and post videos to your pages while you enjoy the same security and strong community Mozilla offers. Download Flock.

Website management tools

Drupal: A popular content management platform

10Does your organization need a content management system? Drupal‘s open-source software package is free to use and allows you to manage members, assign permissions and display content on your site. Drupal can be used for anything from a discussion site or community portal to building and maintaining your organization’s site or blog, and its engaged professional community is constantly rolling out updates and add-ons to improve service. Drupal offers many benefits for the nonprofit sector: It’s affordable and scalable, it gives you control over managing and editing your site and it’s easy to integrate podcasts, multimedia files and other social media. Many nonprofits are using Drupal, including 350.org and Mother Jones. Get started with Drupal.

Other popular open source CMSs or Web frameworks include Joomla, Plone and Ruby on Rails.

WordPress: World’s best blogging platform

11What started as a modest blogging program by a 19-year-old college freshman has grown into the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, and rightfully so. We love WordPress.org — it’s software that you can download and configure to easily build, manage and customize your blog or website. You can find your own web hosting platform or choose a WordPress partner to host it.

WordPress’s thousands of free plug-ins, widgets and (mostly free) themes offer a breathtaking array of choices (don’t overdo it!) and help brand your site and set it aside from the competition. The WordPress community is constantly working to improve the software both remotely and by attending WordCamp conferences. Side note: Socialbrite.org runs on WordPress! Get started with WordPress.

Messaging tools

Pidgin: Connect across chat applications

12Connect instantly with staff, volunteers and the rest of your community regardless of which instant messaging application they use with either Pidgin (if your office computers are PCs) or Adium (if you have Macs). Both are downloadable applications that allow you to connect with almost anyone running AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, Google Talk, MSN, IRC, Facebook and other chat networks — all at the same time. Customize your chat app with unique styles and organize your contacts in any number of manageable lists. Download Pidgin or Adium.

Other open source tools

We couldn’t list every open source tool out there, so please add your favorites in the comments below. Some other open source software includes:

• Bean is a free, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor) for Mac OS X, designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable. From the site: “MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people. But sometimes you just want the right tool for the job. That is Bean’s niche.”

• Thunderbird: Mozilla strikes again with its open source email program. The messaging system allows you to manage email, instant messaging, social networking messages and more in one tool. You can link multiple email accounts to Thunderbird and see all of your incoming messages in one in-box, open tabs just as you would in Firefox allowing you to see multiple emails at once, and completely customize the system to fit your needs and personality. The community has created add-ons to extend its functionality. Download Thunderbird.

• Gimp: Gimp is a photo editing application that rivals Photoshop for retouching images or creating new ones. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux. Download Gimp.

• Inkscape: Inkscape is a graphics application with similar capabilities to Illustrator that lets you create detailed line art. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Download Inkscape.

• For other open-source software exclusive to MAC OS X, visit Open Source Mac.

Related

• Creating an Open-Source Desktop (TechSoup)

• Short video discussion led by Mitchell Baker of Mozilla about open source software.

The post 12 open source tools you should be using appeared first on Socialbrite.

Why Wikipedia supports open video from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

From time to time, Socialbrite explores the use of open source tools by change-makers and social benefit organizations — see below for our past coverage of open video and how open standards can benefit nonprofit tech.

The second annual Open Video conference returns to New York University on Oct. 1-2. If you can make it, it’s a must event for evangelists of open content. At last year’s event, I got to meet Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation and an early advisor to Ourmedia.org, who helped (via email from Berlin) steer us toward the right set of Creative Commons licenses.

In this video interview, Möller tells me why Wikipedia decided early on to support open standards for all video used on the online encyclopedia. “We’ve always had a commitment to open standards,” he said. The Wikimedia brain trust made a decision early on not to support Flash, MPEG-4 or any other proprietary format on Wikipedia when the formats are controlled by a single vendor or handful of vendors. “If [users] all have to get permission from one entity, we would never accept that kind of market power” in other mediums, like TV or radio.

Without question, it was the correct decision — and a vastly important one.

As a result, today Wikipedia has more than 30 million text articles — all available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license — but only 3,000 videos. Erik hopes that changes. He encourages contributors to collaborate and publish “rich educational materials” through video, photo slide shows, animation and rich media on subjects like genetics or natural selection. “The potential is enormous,” he said.

Watch, download or embed the 6-minute video in Theora Ogg on Tinyvid.tv (and let us know if you can’t view it in your browser)

Watch, download or embed the 6-minute video on Vimeo

Watch or embed video on YouTube

For those so inclined, here is the Wikimedia Commons entry on converting video to the Theora Ogg format. The free Miro Theora video converter is available for Windows and Mac computers and features a simple drag-and-drop interface. Since version 3.5 of Firefox was released last year, Firefox now supports HTML 5 video and audio in the browser without the need for proprietary formats like Flash.

So far, Theora remains a promising but geeky codec that hasn’t advanced much since I last wrestled with it three years ago. I just tried converting my H.264 video into Theora using Miro Video Converter — and it came out as a green screen. Firefox 3.6, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari can play back Theora videos with varying degrees of success. But, to be sure, the era of open video on the Web has just dawned.

Side note: Erik Möller developed the proposal for Wikinews, a Wikimedia project, and organized the vote that implemented it. Before joining Wikimedia, Erik was a freelance journalist and author. He now lives in San Francisco.

A production note: I’m trying a new “outro” on this video — that is, the music over the closing credits — with “TheForce” by j1s, a CC BY-NC musical snippet that I found on beat.org.

Related

• Toward a Web of open video: an interview with Mozilla’s Mark Surman (Socialbrite)
• How open standards can benefit nonprofit tech (Socialbrite)
• Boxee and the promise of open media (Socialbrite)
• The promise of open source video (Socialbrite)
• Kaltura: open source video (Socialbrite)
• Creating media: Tools, tutorials, resources (Socialbrite)

The post Why Wikipedia insists on open video appeared first on Socialbrite.

Toward open video on the Web from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago, before and after the Open Video conference at NYU, I sketched out the proposition that open video is a requirement for an open Web in two posts: The promise of open source video and Boxee and the promise of open media.

By some estimates, 90 percent of the traffic on the Internet will be video by 2013, so this affects free and open discourse online. Above is a 7-minute interview I conducted with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, who talks about how video is really separate from the rest of the Web in that it’s a much more closed system. “We need to look at how to make video a first-class citizen on the Web,” he said.

Surman said he hopes a concerted push toward open standards will “shift the market away from a black box video plug-in, where the video is separate from the rest of the page, to something where video can interact with Javascript” or other elements on a Web page.

Video today is locked up (technologically) and locked down (legally). In order for video to become part of the Web’s innovation ecosystem, Surman said, we need to be able to play, manipulate, transform and remix video in the same way we can with photos and data.

In the past two years, the vast majority of video hosting sites have settled on Adobe’s Flash as the format of choice because more than 95 percent of desktop computers and laptops can play them. But Flash isn’t an open source system, and video producers have been limited in how they can make video interact with other Web page elements.

“That may not sounds interesting to those who just watch videos, but it’ll be interesting first to video producers who can do all kinds of innovative things that we can’t even imagine now,” he said.

Firefox 3.5 may be a game-changer

With the recent release of Firefox 3.5, Web developers can now program video within the browser, bypassing Flash, QuickTime, DivX and other codecs altogether. “That means 300 million people will [eventually] have access to native video in their browser,” Surman said. Other browsers, including Safari, Chrome and Opera, are also on board the open video bandwagon.

Where firefox 3.0 was an upgrade for users, “we say Firefox 3.5 is an upgrade for the Web,” he added. That doesn’t mean we’ll see a shift away from Flash .flv video in the next few years, but now the door is open to innovation and experimentation.

Online video “will always be a contested space, but enough people love the Web that they’ll make it happen,” Surman said.

Watch, embed or download video in Flash on Vimeo
Watch or download video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download the original video from Archive.org or watch it in Ogg

Related

• Mark Surman’s tak at the Open Video conference in Ogg Theora

• Breaking: Firefox 3.5 is Released — A Historic Day for Web Video? (beet.tv)

• RiP: A Remix Manifesto: A movie by Brett Taylor

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Matt Mullenweg on the state of WordPress from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At WordCamp San Francisco a few weeks ago, I managed to get a few minutes alone with Matt Mullwenweg, co-founder, chief coder and “Head of Bug Creation” for WordPress. (I self-host Socialbrite and Socialmedia.biz with code from WordPress.org; others use WordPress.com to host their blog.)

In this 5 1/2-minute video interview, Matt discusses the state of WordPress, its astonishing growth here and abroad, the vibrancy of the consumer open source movement and his estimate that about  8,000 coders are contributing code and themes to WordPress today. The recent release of WordPress 2.8.4 (fixing a security hole) makes WordPress, in my view, the best blogging software on the planet (with apologies to newcomer Posterous).

A few highlights from our conversation:

• Matt: “Some people think blogging is slowing down, but from everything we’ve seen, it seems blogging is accelerating just as fast as ever. ”

• Matt: “There’s no real killer feature in software anymore. There are 50 killer features, and everyone has a different 50.”

• WordPress fits into the consumer wave of open source tools. the first wave was purely development tools, the second was infrastructure and the third is consumer” applications like Firefox and Azureus.

• Why are there an estimated 8,000 coders contributing code and themes to WordPress? “WordPress belongs to everybody. Everybody owns WordPress,” Matt says.

• What has surprised him most about WordPress? “Internationalization,” he says. Some 42% of WordPress’s downloads come from overseas, compared with 27% last year. “People abroad are taking the code, adapting it, customizing it and making it their own and taking it to a new level.”

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

The first WordCamp was held in San Francisco three years ago, and since then dozens of WordCamps have sprung up around the world, from Vancouver to Dallas to Milan, Italy. It’s an amazing thing to watch and to be a part of. (Socialbrite and its developer have contributed a Creative Commons plug-in to the WordPress community.)

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Symbian goes open source from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Probably few people have noticed that Symbian, the operating system that powers nearly half the world’s smartphones (compared with the iPhone’s 1.1% overall market share), is opening up its platform and going open source.

“Being open source has made an incredible difference in how we interact with the community,” says Anatolie Papas of the Symbian Foundation. In this 5-minute video, she talks about recent changes at Symbian, the value of open source, and the large number of software developers around the world writing code for Symbian-powered mobile devices.

The interview was conducted at the Traveling Geeks‘ Tweetup in London — which Symbian helped support — on July 5, 2009, with a Flip Ultra, and you’ll notice a few audio artifacts.

Anatolie charges her Symbian phone once every 2-3 days and uses it for data uploads and downloads constantly (which iPhone users can only dream of). She also talks about her “absolutely fantastic” Samsung Omnia HD i8910 phone (pictured), which sports an 8 megapixel camera, and mentions some of the cool Symbian-powered smartphones coming out this fall, including the new Sony Ericsson Satio with its 12 megapixel camera.

As I understand this, Nokia, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, AT&T and other companies formed the Symbian Foundation a year ago with contributions of software assets from Nokia, NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson. The open-source OS now in development will unite Symbian with Nokia’s Symbian-based S60 platform as well as two other platforms built on it: UIQ and NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP (Mobile Oriented Applications Platform).

It was great meeting Anatolie and I hope to run into her again.

Watch or embed the video on Vimeo

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I don’t know about you, but I am a big fan of open standards, particularly when my bladder Direct Messages me with the hashtag #urgent. Open standards (see picture below) guide me to a place where I can @reply in a hurry.

In June, I hosted a discussion about Collaboration and Competition on Social Edge in which the topic of open standards for the nonprofit sector was raised. In response to a comment from David Wolff, I wrote:

Jo Davidson then replied:

I replied to Jo:

Where to go from here

The nonprofit technology community is filled with many bright minds and innovative thinkers. For better or worse, this passion often gets channeled toward one-off projects that benefit a single organization or a coalition of organizations.

I would like to see the brightest minds and most innovative thinkers in the social sector come together to create open standards that lift all organizations making use of the social web. The open standards that I’d like to see developed and adopted would help social benefit organizations seamlessly publish rich information about their donation opportunities in a structured format, helping major grant-makers and citizen philanthropists make smarter choices about their giving.

I’d also like to see open standards developed and adopted that help organizations publish rich information about their volunteer opportunities and the events they are hosting, helping individuals connect with service opportunities and events effortlessly. Finally, I’d like to see open standards developed and adopted that help nonprofits fill out their social media profile once and have it syndicated everywhere and anywhere on the fly.

From a technological perspective, these are modest goals. Where they become difficult to achieve is at the level of organizational culture, grant-making priorities, and leadership. I understand fully that this conversation has been launched on many occasions over the years. I’m hoping that in 2009, we can overcome cultural, funding, and leadership barriers to create a nonprofit sector that charts its own course toward open standards, open data and collaborative innovation.

If you are interested in participating in the open standards and open data conversation, please leave a comment below.

The next time your nonprofit’s stakeholders collectively Direct Message you with the hashtag #urgent, you’ll be able to @reply with a simple message: Open standards and open data are helping you respond quickly and effectively.

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