In just three short years since OVC kicked off, the horizons of what can be done with HTML5 video have expanded massively—and the potential for open video is only continuing to grow.

One great project that we think illustrates this potential is the work of filmmaker Kat Cizek and her team on the Highrise project—a multi-year multimedia documentary effort from the National Film Board of Canada that examines the experiences of those living in high-rise residential buildings all over the world.

The first Highrise release, Out My Window, was designed for the web—enabling viewers to freely browse the stories of many international high-rise residents and explore their environments in 360 degrees.

Now, the team is assembling the world’s first open-source HTML5/WebGL documentary, One Millionth Tower. The project uses a virtual landscape to re-imagine a dilapidated highrise neighborhood in suburban Toronto, giving users the opportunity to interact with the environment and reshape the neighborhood. While the real-world site on which the virtual environment is modeled is a hyper-local story for Toronto, the online experience makes it a global, or as the filmmakers call it, “hyper-glocal,” experience with relevance to similar communities worldwide.

One Millionth Tower is based on a number of existing open source technologies, including Mozilla’s Popcorn, Mr. Doob’s three.js javascript library for WebGL, Google Map and Streetview data, and much more. Open source fits the philosophy of the project, with its basis in participatory urban design and collaborative documentary production.

We think One Millionth Tower is a great example of the new possibilities emerging in the world of open video. It’s a perfect illustration of the ideas we’ll be working on at OVC, bringing together innovative new approaches from filmmakers, technologists, and many others.

The conference starts next weekend, so be sure to register today!

We’re pleased to announce that Gigi Sohn will be delivering a keynote address at the 2011 Open Video Conference. Gigi is the president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit organization that works to defend citizens’ rights in emerging digital frontiers. She serves as the chief strategist, fundraiser, and public face of Public Knowledge, and has made numerous media appearances and published articles highlighting emerging issues in the public’s access to content.

Gigi has long been recognized as a pioneer in identifying key issues facing digital media. Prior to co-founding Public Knowledge, she served as Executive Director of the Media Access Project, and as a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit, where she developed the Foundation’s first-ever media policy and technology portfolio. In October 1997, President Clinton appointed Gigi to serve as a member of his Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Gigi one of its Internet “Pioneer Awards” in 2006.

At this year’s OVC, Gigi will be speaking about timely questions of internet accessibility, including the threats that capped and metered internet access pose to the open web. We’re thrilled to have her expertise and insight as we examine these issues at the conference.

Be sure to register for the OVC today to get a seat at this talk and all our other events and working groups.

Last week, the Internet Archive relaunched their 9/11 News Archive in a conference at NYU. We’re pleased to announce that Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and senior engineer Tracey Jaquith will be holding a talk at the OVC on this project and what it means for the future of archiving video.

The 9/11 News Archive is part of the Internet Archive’s effort to preserve and digitize video over the past ten years. While streaming services like YouTube and Netflix have quickly raised the public expectation that video will be readily searchable and available online, these are relatively recent developments. Over the course of the decade, the Internet Archive has faced a number of technical difficulties and hurdles in their effort to create a digital library of video that can be effectively searched, cited, and quoted.

At their talk at OVC, Brewster and Tracey will be discussing how the 9/11 News Archive addresses these important issues in video archiving, as well as detailing some of the technology used and the challenges faced in digitizing the archive.

Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive in 1996. An entrepreneur and Internet pioneer, Brewster invented the first Internet publishing system and helped put newspapers and publishers online in the 1990′s.

Tracey Jaquith was a founding coder and the system architect for the Internet Archive 1996-2000, writing multi-threaded servers and crawlers, as well as parallel processing code. She returned in 2004 and is focusing on archiving and video.

The 9/11 News Archive compiles 3,000 hours of television news from the week of the 9/11 attacks. The archive itself will be accessible in an exhibit at OVC through a unique touchscreen interface.

We’re honored to announce that this talk will be scheduled for Sunday, September 11 at 11:00 AM.

Register today.