Socialbrite

Rewarding open source for social good

kiwanja — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 12:51:33 +0000

Do you know a software developer building open source tools with the potential to positively impact communities around the world? If you do – or you are one – then read on.

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!

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Matt Mullenweg on the state of WordPress

JD Lasica — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:26:15 +0000

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.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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Open source’s growing influence

Guest — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:48:37 +0000

Guest post by Renee Blodgett
CEO, Magic Sauce Media

At this week’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, the open source video company Kaltura organized and participated in a SaaS Goes Open Source panel (SaaS as in Software as a Service).

In this video interview, Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel says open source is disruptive but on the rise, and it tears down those garden walls, giving corporations better control, flexibility and better integration. SpikeSource, Zimbra, Acquia, Fenwick & West and Alfresco were the other companies joining Ron on the panel.

Renee Blodgett is the CEO of Magic Sauce Media, a strategic communications, social media and branding consultancy. This post originally appeared at Renee’s Down the Avenue and is republished with permission.

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Symbian: Going open source has made huge difference

JD Lasica — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:08:50 +0000

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

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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How open standards can benefit nonprofit tech

Guest — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:52:12 +0000

Guest post by Peter Deitz
SocialActions

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.

Source: Robotson on Flickr

In the nonprofit technology community, open standards of a different variety could help us all become more effective at what we urgently need to do: raise money, recruit and coordinate volunteers, promote events, create profiles on social networks, generate reports for grant-makers, and the list goes on.

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:

When a sector comes together to create a standard, anything from the diameter of a bottle cap to protocols for mobile devices, businesses and consumers in the sector benefit. Businesses reduce their costs because manufacturers don’t have to build custom factories / product lines each time they sign a contract. Consumers also benefit. Anyone who has fastened a Pepsi cap onto a Coco-Cola bottle and then ridden their bike home knows what I’m talking about … Sometimes collaborating in one area raises the bar of competition in another.

Chris Messina recently made this point at the NetSquared conference as it relates to open standards for managing one’s identity online, ‘… [Social networks] should compete on the quality of the service that they’re providing, as opposed to just their lock in.’ Have a look at this interview, Building a Ubiquitous Social Network – Interview With Chris Messina for more information.

Jo Davidson then replied:

Agree with you, Peter, a single universal standard would be the best way to work collaboration into competition, setting everyone up on a level playing field to bloom and grow.

I replied to Jo:

The beauty of widespread adoption of universal standards in the social sector is that they could be used to both compete better and collaborate better, depending on one’s personal preference. I envision the adoption of open standards for nonprofits and philanthropy leading to dramatic and meaningful collaborations that can form on the fly. Rather than bringing the boards of multiple organizations together to have conversations about sharing data and knowledge, the data would already be exposed and already be interchangeable.

The collaboration question becomes when and how, instead of if. Coming up with the standard, to ensure that it reflects as much nuances in the form of the data and knowledge is difficult. But the process absolutely can and should be done, across the social sector and in business as well.

Open data is a powerful force that can drive both collaboration and innovation. But a collaborative and innovative mindset is critical to ensuring that the open data that emerges is rich and reflects the best interests of everyone involved.

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.

Peter Deitz is a blogger, social media consultant, and the founder of Social Actions, a website that helps people find and share opportunities to make a difference.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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Socialbrite developer releases CC plug-in

JD Lasica — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:14:37 +0000

Last month, when Socialbrite launched, we announced that our developer — Buenos Aires tech guru Esteban Glas — had crafted a Creative Commons plug-in that woud allow users of WordPress blogs to use different CC licenses for each post on the site.

On Wednesday Esteban released WP-License Plugin Reloaded to the WordPress community, and already others have discovered it in the WordPress plug-in directory and have begun to use it. Here’s Esteban’s announcement on his blog:

Part of the work I’ve been doing with JD Lasica for his Socialbrite project (yes, there is an irony in the fact that a careless, sarcastic SoB teamed up with a caring, polite and nice guy such as JD) included creating a Creative Commons plugin. I’m quite proud to say that I’ve released the plugin for the public in version 0.1.1.

It is based on the amazing Job by Nathan R. Yergler and his WP-Licencse Plugin.

What WP-license Reloaded does is allowing per-post licensing. This is particularly helpful for multiple author blogs and sites.

This plugin is in its early stages. For the future I have planned:

Defaulting licenses (on a per blog and per author basis)
Bulk Updating licienses (for older posts)
I18n of the plugin.
Anything else you might suggest and that I find cool enough to implement.

I’ve always thought that copyright (the traditional one) is a big halt to human and knowledge progress. Now I can lie to myself and think I made some progress by unleashing this plugin to the public.

Feel free to add suggestions in the comments.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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NPtech + causes + open source + social media

JD Lasica — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:21:32 +0000

As part of our silo-busting effort at Socialbrite, we’ll be showcasing cool technologies that haven’t received enough attention in the nonprofit and social change worlds. So here’s a one-minute video, announcing the launch of Socialbrite, that I created last night on Animoto:

Introducing Socialbrite.org. Nonprofit tech + Causes + Open source + Social media.

We’re using it at the top of our Media Center.

Check out Animoto: They’re doing amazing things with a very small staff. You can try out a few remixes for free, and choose from music and images on their site; after that, it’s 3 bucks a video or $30 a year.

I chose to upload Enur: “Calabria (Club Mix)” — given that it’s only a 60-second snippet and has a noncommercial context here, it clearly falls within fair use. (One image included in the video is Creative Commons licensed: Muchilottu Bhagavathy Theyyam ceremonial mask by freebird (bobinson).)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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Introducing Socialbrite: Why we’re here

JD Lasica — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:39:11 +0000

Socialbrite.org fills a glaring gap in the social media world. While young people and early adopters increasingly turn to the social Web not only to socialize but to communicate, explore new ideas and share new experiences, nonprofits and social change organizations are still generally stuck in the top-down, one-way world of Web 1.0.

The young and the wired are moving at an accelerating pace away from old-school destination Web sites and toward the social media ecosystem embodied in the real-time Web. In this new world of Twitter and Facebook, of citizen journalism and astonishing grassroots campaigns like Twestival, it’s easy to feel befuddled by the dizzying pace of change.

That’s why eight leading nonprofit technologists and social marketing experts have come together to create this learning and sharing hub. Socialbrite is here to offer articles, videos, resources and tutorials on how to take command of all this Web 2.0 jazz and put it to work for your organization or cause. (We created a cheat sheet for you to help tweet our launch.)

And please note: We’re here not only to show how social tools can be used to advance the social good – but to learn from you as well. We’ll be republishing some of these articles on learning wikis, and everything here is released under a Creative Commons license, so we hope you’ll take part in this ecosystem of sharing.

A sharing and learning hub

We invite you to cruise around the site — and we hope you’ll help us spread the word. You’ll notice that we’re not starting from scratch. You’ll find:

• A directory of Web 2.0 Productivity Tools in dozens of categories that can help organizations get a handle on the social Web.

• A Social Media Glossary that offers a deep, friendly introduction to dozens of social media terms in plain English.

• A first-of-its-kind Twitter widget that tracks tweets about nonprofits or social causes in real time.

• A Free Photos Directory, Free Video Directory and Free Music Directory that offers nonprofits, cause organizations and Web publishers a guide to hundreds of online resources for adding legal, high-quality content to their own websites, blogs, newsletters, printed materials or online presentations.

• A Causes widget that points to charitable actions and donations on other sites such as Global Giving and Facebook Causes.

• Scores of additional articles, guides and tutorials to help newcomers and veterans alike get better acquainted with this fast-moving space.

Team members

I (@jdlasica) am joined in this effort by:

• Beth Kanter (@kanter), the author/trainer/strategist behind Beth’s Blog

• Katrin Verclas (@katrinskaya), founder and editor-in-chief of MobileActive.org and past executive director of NTEN.

• John Haydon (@johnhaydon), who advises small non-profits, small businesses and social entrepreneurs on how to implement inbound marketing strategies with the social web.

• Amy Sample Ward (@amyrsward), organizer of London Net Tuesday, who connects nonprofits with new media technologies.

• Ken Banks (@kiwanja), a Hewlett Foundation grant recipient who focuses on using mobile technology to foster positive social and environmental change in the developing world, particularly Africa.

• Sloane Berrent (@sloane, a Kiva fellow, social philanthropy activist and a former executive at Causecast who’s currently serving a three-month tour in the Philippines.

• Carla Schlemminger (@carlainsf, who has more than 17 years experience in marketing communications, branding and strategic public relations.

Credits for our launch

We want to acknowledge some of the people who got us to the launch pad:

• Esteban Panzeri, the brilliant Argentinian developer and tech god who built most of the site based on some sketchy wireframes.

• The team at BlitzLocal in Boulder, Colo. — especially Dennis Yu, Chad King and Austin Stierler — who took us under their wing and agreed to host us for free.

• Beth, Amy, Katrin, John, Ken, Sloane and Carla, who all took a leap of faith in signing onto this team effort.

• Matt Mullenweg and the entire WordPress development community for their open source code and awesome set of plug-ins. And a thank-you to the coders at Intense Debate for the commenting system we settled on.

• Uta Ritke, the Marin County graphic designer who designed our logotype.

• Chad Capellman of Boston, who lent his development help and keen CSS eye to this project.

• Elegant Themes, the WordPress premium themes house that gave us the underpinnings to build our customized theme upon.

Please join the conversation

We want this to be your site, too! Please add your voice — tell us what conversations, articles and resources you’d like to see on Socialbrite.org in the months ahead.

As we explain on our About page, we’re out to bust some silos. When it comes to sharing insights about the tools and best practices that drive the social Web and advance the social good, the nonprofit, citizen media, open source and education communities have more in common than we realize — but we rarely talk with each other.

So one of our goals at Socialbrite is to help people in any sector get up to speed on the social Web and find the right strategy and tactics to help your organization or cause.

We believe that people — not large institutions — will be the driving force behind social change in the years ahead. People want to make a difference, and now we have the tools to help others — directly, smartly, without intermediaries.

It’ll be fascinating to report on those developments — and put them into practice — in the years ahead. Hope you’ll pay us a visit and follow us on Twitter!

• Tweet our launch!
• Site announcement: news release
• About Socialbrite

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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Boxee and the promise of open media

JD Lasica — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:30:49 +0000

At last weekend’s Open Video Conference, where 850 people turned out at NYU to discuss the future of open media, the standout open source project — at least for me — was Boxee. It’s not so much a company as a cause.

This is a big subject, so, first, a word about the conference, put on by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons and the Open Video Alliance. I wrote about the promise of open source video earlier this month, participated in the conference, and now have a much better understanding of the issues at stake.

Jenny Attiyeh, host and producer for Boston-based ThoughtCast, conducted interviews at the conference and produced this riveting 4-minute video (embedded above) that looks at the importance of open media for getting the word out about the demonstrations and government crackdown in Iran.

Mark Surman of Mozilla, whom I interviewed (I’ll post the video in the coming weeks), gave a stirring talk and wrote this on his commonspace blog: “We love [the Web] 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.”

The Open Video Alliance also summed up what’s at stake:

As internet video matures, we face a crossroads: will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture — one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture?

Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right — but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

YouTube and other online video applications are rightly celebrated for empowering end-users; however, online video lacks some of the essential qualities that make text and images on the web such powerful tools for free speech and technical innovation. Email, blogs, and other staples of the open web rely on ubiquitous and interoperable technologies that have low barriers to entry; they are massively decentralized and resistant to censorship or regulation. Video, meanwhile, relies on centralized distribution and proprietary technologies which can threaten cultural discourse and innovation.

My friends Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman put together this terrific compilation of interviews about open video — check out the amazing variety of organizations involved in the movement.

Boxee: Setting your TV free

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen (photo by Steve Garfield

Boxee, which styles itself as an “open, connected, social media center, took a big step into the mainstream Tuesday with the release of its Windows application. It’s software you plunk into your laptop — not hardware or a set-top box. (Here’s the Wikipedia entry.)

Here’s how it works:

“On a laptop or connected to an HDTV, boxee’s free software lets you navigate all your personal movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr from one screen with a remote.”

And here’s why Boxee is an important ingredient in the open media ecosystem: It’s not for couch potatoes, as their home page misimplies, but rather for people who want to put the Web in their living rooms. There’s nothing passive or lean-back about taking control of your media intake by wrestling it away from Hollywood, the cable companies and satellite operators.

You cannot watch video from the open Web on AppleTV — only from Apple’s licensed partners. You can’t watch Web video on Joost — only from Joost partners.

On Boxee, you can watch anything on the open Web.

In my 2005 book Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (which had five stars on Amazon until the anti-free culture zealots — who didn’t read the book — dove in), I interviewed Warren Lieberfarb, the father of the DVD (the chapter is online here):

Hollywood looks at interactive media as an opportunity to shop or upsell merchandise, but the studios get nervous about true interactivity because they lose control over the entertainment experience.

Warren Lieberfarb, the visionary former head of Warner Home Video, thinks it won’t be long before we’ll be able to purchase and store our own personal collection of movies and transport it from device to device, anywhere within an extended home domain.

“I see a very, very, very big transformation that’s going to change the balance of power in media,” he says, choosing his words with care. “It will step away from the broadcast and cable networks to specialized niche programming that will be accessible through on-demand services. That is the revolution. And nothing is going to stop this.” …

“All this is going to bypass the broadcast and cable networks,” he says. “The whole notion that you sit at a television at a designated time and you tune in to watch what they say you watch—it’s over. It’s going to take a while, but it’s over.”

Warren Lieberfarb
Just as the Internet and the proliferation of low-cost digital tools have reshaped other media, so the new technologies will transform our notion of television. A few years from now, when you say “television,” it may no longer be synonymous with the box in your living room because you also will be watching it on your handheld mobile device or tablet PC. “What’s on TV” may no longer be synonymous with network and cable programming because you’ll be able to access video feeds from a wide range of new content providers. When you do watch television in your living room, you’ll still wield a remote control, but you may be watching it on a stand-alone digital box or one that’s hooked up to a media-center device or wirelessly connected to a PC, giving you the power to pull niche material from a gushing fire hose of sources.

“People are going to discover that content doesn’t have to be produced by the major media companies,” Lieberfarb says. …

Lieberfarb is not saying the old order of Big Media programming will be overthrown by a cabal of camcorder-wielding Young Turks. But he is saying that the major media companies will no longer exercise exclusive control over what Americans watch on TV. …

“Change is not going to come from the media conglomerates that have too much at stake in protecting the status quo.”
— Warren LieberfarbFormidable business interests will oppose a mass rollout of easily accessible on-demand media for the public because it threatens their existing business models, Lieberfarb says. In the years ahead, vertically integrated media companies will use their marketplace dominance and their clout in Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the courts in an effort to maintain their role as exclusive intermediaries, as gatekeepers of information and entertainment.

“That’s why I think audiovisual media, available online on demand, will take place from the edge”—here he holds his hands wide apart—”and not from the center of the media industry. Change is not going to come from the media conglomerates that have too much at stake in protecting the status quo.” …

How to put television’s pieces back together? We need to arrive at a new place of user participation and interaction. The tools are at hand: a converged cable TV and Internet gateway that lets subscribers pay a small monthly fee (80 percent of Americans already pay for cable TV or satellite) in return for a high-speed freeway ramp connecting us to hundreds of niche video channels created by entrepreneurs, amateurs, and independent professionals.

Will the companies controlling the pipes into our houses also control what comes through it? Will they continue to be our visual gatekeepers? “No,” Lieberfarb says firmly. “People will be able to access any Web sites delivering movies and video.”

That is exactly what this battle is still about. We are now at the formative stages of this war over our television viewing experience.

A number of software applications have been around for years that let you connect your laptop to your digital television to watch Web video on your TV set, but they were kludgy and clunky. Boxee makes it easy. What’s more, it hooks you into a social community:

Users can see what their friends are watching and listening to via an online Web feed or directly inside of the application. Once installed, the home screen shows a list of content suggested by friends, their activities and even their newly added content. Users can also use the popular micro-blogging service Twitter or FriendFeed to automatically share what they’re watching or listening to, with the rest of the world.

At the Open Video Conference, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen described the Boxee open source media center as “a Firefox for the home.” You run it on your laptop, connect it to your TV, use a remote control to access videos, photos and online services like YouTube and Hulu.

Unlike companies like Microsoft and Sony, which put their own business interests above their customers’ interests, Boxee is focused strictly on serving the user. Conveniently, Ronen said: “We generate no revenues so it’s hard to be profitable. We don’t aspire to profitability.” The company is not charging for subscriptions or using advertising.

“The entertainment companies’ mindset is: If it’s in the living room, it’s ours.”
— Jonathan ZittrainBig Entertainment is not pleased, for a number of reasons. First, companies like Hulu don’t have the licensing rights for its programming to appear on your TV set — just on your computer screen. Second, the ads that appear on the Hulu website do not appear when you stream the Hulu video to your TV with Boxee (with good reason — they’re made for a small screen, not a TV screen). Third, programming created for the Web looks different on a digital TV — the colors bleed differently, for one thing. Fourth, and most important, Hollywood loses its control over your TV viewing experience. If you can access any video site on the Web, then Hollywood and the cable companies lose control over what you can buy or rent.

In February, Hulu contacted Boxee asking them to explain themselves. As Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain said from the stage: “The entertainment companies’ mindset is: If it’s in the living room, it’s ours.”

Ronen said from the stage: “We now understand the industry’s concerns. We understand they want to control how videos and commercials are getting to the TV. They want control over the timing and delivery. But we’re not planning to slow down or change what we’re doing.” Huge applause from the audience.

On Tuesday, when more then 800 people turned out for the party in San Francisco marking the release of Boxee for Windows (it previously worked just on the Mac and Linux), Boxee took a big step forward into the limelight.

The jocular Avner says, “Consumer behavior is changing, resistance is futile.”

The reason Hollywood hasn’t come after Boxee to crush it? Not many people know about it. At least not yet.

Hollywood thinks it still owns your television. Time will tell if they’re right.

More background

• Mark Surman of Mozilla at commonspace: Building an open video movement!

• Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla: why open video?

• Socialbrite: The promise of open source video

• TechCrunch: Boxee Swings For The Fences: Windows Support, MLB, Digg, Tumblr And Current All Launch Tonight

• Mashable: What is Boxee Announcing Tonight? [Live Video]

• ZDNet: How-to: Install boxee and XBMC on the Apple TV

• NewTeeVee: For Boxee CEO, Hulu Desktop Brings Hope

• Engadget: Hulu to PlayStation 3 browsers: “This video is not available on your platform”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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The promise of open source video

JD Lasica — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:25:51 +0000

On June 19-20, 2009, I’ll be at New York University’s School of Law attending the Open Video Conference. To my surprise and delight, this is turning out to be quite a big event.

Socialbrite readers get 15 percent the registration fee (regularly $75 for individuals and nonprofits and $200 for companies). The event will be held June 19-20 at NYU.

Shay David of Kaltura

The open source landscape has come quite a long way in the past few years, and its importance to the media landscape can hardly be overestimated, said Shay David — co-founder and CTO of Kaltura and a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project — by phone as he sped to the airport for yet another trip abroad.

“If you want an open structure of media to guarantee that the future of media is not proprietary and locked down, then open is the only way to go,” he said. “If we care about democratized media, where citizens in their living rooms can access programming from more than just three or four media conglomerates, then we should care about open video.”

But David’s warning is not a call to arms against entrenched corporate interests. “Millions of lines of code have been written in the open video world without a lot of success,” he acknowledged.

Rather, it’s a call for reasoned partnerships: public and private, new and old, for-profit and nonprofit. We need to think beyond licenses and consider how to build real businesses that are built on open and democratic principles — and translate that into real economic value. In short, he argues that open video is not just about serving the interests of users. Open video is good for business, too.

Surveying the open media landscape

Davis is one of the few people I’ve heard who can provide context around what has been happening in the open source movement. Some developers, like those working on Ogg Theora, are focusing on open-sourcing the codec through video compression. Others, like the Mozilla Foundation, are targeting the user experience through the Firefox browser. (Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari run on the open source WebKit rendering engine.) Still others, like ccMixter (a community remix site sponsored by Creative Commons) and Jamendo (a music platform and community where you can download and listen to over 15,000 albums legally) are targeting the content licensing layer. And David’s own Kaltura is the first open source video platform for online video management, creation, interaction and collaboration; with more than 25,000 publishers, “it’s the fastest-growing video platform on the Web,” he said. Wikipedia is scheduled to begin using Kaltura’s video platform throughout the online encyclopedia some time this summer. (Another worthy effort is the Participatory Culture Foundation’s Miro software.)

All told, a global community of developers has emerged around the open video movement, he said. “From my perspective, the world is divided into three parts: The technical architecture of an open system. The legal issues around who owns content management rights. And the infrastructure layer: codecs, formats, patents.”

The Open Video Conference is one measure of the movement’s robustness. With zero marketing budget, the organizers quickly heard from 180 different projects and nonprofits that applied to present. Somewhere between 600 and 800 people are expected to attend. From the website: “Open Video is more than just open codecs. It’s the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video.”

David said that over the past year or so, some clarity has come to the open video movement. “One of the things we learned is that we can’t use Flash in the production layer, because under Adobe’s term, we’re free to use it but not free to use and rework in the sense of free software.” Thus, Kaltura is participating in developing an open source alternative.

Open video adherents like David are not against Apple or Adobe, but they do want to create an alternative in the market that uses true open source technology as the basis for a for-profit business. “We’re running a business, not a charity,” David said.

Of the creative ferment in the open source video movement, he said, “I see a tremendous amount of interest in the market for this, connecting people who are working on browsers and codecs and players and bring them all together. There’s something in the air.”

• My video interview with Kaltura CEO and co-founder Ron Yekutiel
• Streamingmedia.com: Shay David essay, “Industry Perspectives: The Promise of Open Source Video”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

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