This weekend we’re getting intellectually proper with a whole slew of amazing people in the info activism community. This year has sold out, which is both great news for some and unfortunate for others. However, there’s still time to ask reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian some questions.

Khan Academy has been killing it. The popular video education website now contains over 3,000 educational videos, with topics ranging from basic algebra to 17th century baroque painting. The Khan Academy videos are made available on their website under an open license which allows users to not only view the videos, but also incorporate the video in their websites and remix the videos for their customized educational needs. Khan has delivered almost 130 million of these video lessons to hungry learners online. The Khan Academy videos are Open Educational Resources–OER for short.

Open Educational Resources are free to use and always permit users to engage in the “4Rs”: they can revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute the OER. Online, these automatic permissions are super useful because they save teachers, students, and self learners the time, money, and effort of having to track down the owner and ask their permission to use the learning resource. Open Educational Resources have been around now for over 10 years. You may have heard of some big OER projects such as MIT OpenCourseWare or CK-12 open textbooks. Most Open Educational Resources are licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

The problem with OER is that not that many people know about them. So, Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute have teamed up to host the Why Open Education Matters video competition. We want people to create short videos that explains the benefits and promise of Open Educational Resources for teachers, students and schools everywhere. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a champion of OER, and recorded a short video that introduces the contest. The first prize winner will be awarded $25,000, and we’ve lined up some great judges, including Nina Paley, Davis Guggenheim, and James Franco. Please jump in and share your creative video-making skills to explain and promote OER.

Submissions are due by June 5, 2012 on http://whyopenedmatters.org. We’re eating our own dog food too–any video that is submitted must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license so that it can be freely used and shared by anyone to help explain Open Educational Resources. Roll camera!

What an incredible weekend. Nearly 400 people came face-to-face to work on the biggest issues in developing an open media ecosystem.

It’s going to take some time to unpack the Hadron Collider-style interaction and collaboration that took place at #ovc11—so let’s get started!

Documentation

Each session shared a collaborative space to ease note-taking and future work. Links to all the session notes are listed at: openvideoconference.org/notes

A lot of rich material was created, covering a range of topics. For example, there’s enough to get started on serving your own YouTube style Video CMS, building an open video editing platform, or syncing up video with interactive web elements.

You can read up on advanced video forensics, and the struggle to remain anonymous in a world of overwhelming surveillance. Learn about your rights as a mobile device owner and the limits to free expression online. There are now ways to keep your film alive past its release date, keep it preserved past your lifetime, and compensate your work through new experiments in digital currency. If you’re an educator, there are now advanced ways to use video in the classroom. Also, for good measure, a few strategies for counterbalancing hate speech on the internet.

Communication

We’re asking participants to give feedback on our short survey to make next year even more awesome.

As always, email us if you’d like to kick up a project, tweet with hashtag #openvideo, and look forward for updates on next year’s Open Video Conference!

It may seem strange to house such a diversity of perspectives under one roof. But open video is just as important for technology companies and entrepreneurs as it is for creators, educators, and human rights activists on the front lines of change.

Since 2009, the participants of the Open Video Conference have been threading a needle through a fairly big story. The first OVC took place at the precise time that images of Iranian election protests were reaching Western eyes through email, blogs, and platforms like YouTube. Today, cameraphone images from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere appear on screens around the world.

We’re still weaving this story. In just three short years, we’ve seen big shifts in network policy, broad transformations in public life, and constant changes in technology. The media is more read/writeable than ever before, but we’re far from the full potential of web video: a day when every person on the planet can express their world through moving images. Video will be most powerful as a medium when it’s as copy-pastable, accessible, and ubiquitous as text.

There’s much work to be done here on technological, legal, and practical fronts. A careful observer will find urgency even in quiet places like libraries—consider that in 2011, the Library of Congress still relies on RealVideo as its primary video technology (if this makes you shake your head, this is definitely the event for you).

This year’s event is designed to be more hands-on than years past. You’ll find few talks and panels. Instead, you’ll be meeting people, making things, and laying plans. There are over 30 working groups scheduled for you to explore and participate. And if you’re inspired at any time this weekend, you’ll find plenty of time and open space to start something big.

As you’re hacking, writing, filming, or meeting future collaborators this weekend, consider some of the emerging issues in web video. How will we retain control and sovereignty over our digital lives, when the devices we carry are increasingly restrictive of the apps and services we can access? How will we protect identity in a world of thorough surveillance and networked facial recognition? What are the new power dynamics in a world where anyone can make and share video?

These are just a few of the threads you’ll find in this expansive story. We hope that your experience at this year’s OVC will be productive, thought-provoking, and fun.

This is the foreword to the OVC 2011 Program written by conference directors Ben Moskowitz and Chris Wong – download a copy of the program here.

PIPA is designed to limit sites that are typically used only for infringing upon copyrighted works. However, a diverse array of tech entrepreneurs and human rights groups have critiqued the bill as too vague and thus potentially too far-reaching about what constitutes a site “dedicated to infringing activities.” This could lead to an unfair burden placed on businesses and sites that have many uses aside from “rogue” activity.

Web entrepreneurs are currently gathering signatures for a letter to Congress voicing their concerns. If you represent a video startup and are concerned about PIPA, consider adding your name to the letter.

This is just one of the ongoing debates that make our meeting this weekend so timely. We look forward to hearing our diverse group of participants weigh in on issues like these at OVC 2011.

We’re pleased to announce that Flumotion, a supporter of this year’s OVC, will be streaming the Open Video Conference. Our six keynotes will be streamed live via Flumotion’s Online Video and Radio Publishing Platform on open formats, with fallback to Flash, Windows Media, and Silverlight. The streams will also be available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone 7 devices. All these streams will be available on the front page of the OVC site as well as on Flumotion’s site.

We’re happy to have Flumotion among our supporters. As active supporter and early adopter of open technologies, the new Flumotion platform enables the creation of HTML5 video players or live as well as on demand streaming. “The annual Online Video Conference is the perfect occasion to showcase our new HTML5 developments as well as our continued support of open technologies”, explains OVC conference speaker and Flumotion Co-founder Thomas Vander Stichele.

The OVC starts this Saturday at 9:30 AM with a keynote from Jillian York. This keynote will be streamed by Flumotion along with the following OVC events:

Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels (Saturday, 10:00)
Cindy Gallop: Make Love, Not Porn (Saturday, 5:45)
Keynote: Gigi Sohn (Sunday, 10:30)
Brewster Kahle and Tracey Jacquith present the 9/11 Archive at Archive.org (Sunday, 11:00)
Keynote: Marvin Ammori (Sunday, 5:00)<

We’d like to thank Flumotion for their support and for offering these streams for those that can’t make it out to the event. Be sure to use the hashtag #ovc11 to join in on the discussion on Twitter.

As a researcher with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and now the new director for MIT’s Center for Civic Media), Ethan Zuckerman is one of the foremost experts on internet civil discourse. Last year he addressed the difficult tensions and compromises that exist with the current private hosting infrastructure for online video.

Unfortunately Ethan couldn’t join us this time around, as he is busily writing his book and transitioning to MIT. Instead, he was able to spare some time to record a video message to OVC 2011 participants where he discusses the impact of current events on these ongoing issues. Have a look!

We’re just a few days away from the Open Video Conference, and by now you’ve undoubtedly checked out our packed schedule of amazing events, sessions, speakers, and exhibits  – if not, then take a look at our newly updated program here. It can be hard to find time for all the sessions you want to attend, so we’ve mapped out a few possible ‘pathways’ representing the numerous disciplines and fields our attendees will be coming from. Read on for some tips to find sessions that best suit your interests and expertise, whether you’re coming to us from the the world of policy, business, tech, cinema, or many others.

Policy
Visual Privacy? Visual Anonymity?
Creating an Alternative Copyright Education
The Many Faces of Open
A Defensive Patent License
New Currencies and Compensation Models
Making the Map
Designing a Next-Generation TV Interface
Mobile Content Neutrality
Is the Web Safe for Expression?
Robolawyers for the Web: DMCA Automation

Legal
Creating an Alternative Copyright Education
A Defensive Patent License
Developing the Vimeo Rights Platform
Making the Map
Is the Web Safe for Expression?
Robolawyers for the Web: DMCA Automation

Entrepreneurs
Using Open Source in a Commercial Context
Roll Your Own Video CMS
New Currencies and Compensation Models
Making the Map
Intro to Popcorn.js and Plugin Sprint

Programmers
WebRTC: Realtime Communication and HTML5
Fun with WebGL, the Audio API, and more
The Missing Link: Flash to HTML5
Standards for Accessibility
Standards for HTTP Adaptive Streaming
Standards for Browser Video Playback Metrics
Open Video Editors
Scalable HTML5 Players Skill Share
Intro to Popcorn.js and Plugin Sprint

Designers
Designing Storyworlds
Roll Your Own Video CMS
Making the Map
Designing a Next-Generation TV Interface

Filmmakers
Designing Storyworlds
Creating an Alternative Copyright Education
Connected Documentary
Making the Map
Database Driven Narratives

Artists
Alternative Copyright Education
Making a Remix Maker
Making the Map
Database-Driven Narratives
Capturing Oral History: Best Practices
Is the Web Safe for Expression?

Archivists
Video Archives: Life after Production
Capturing Oral History: Best Practices

Earlier today, we introduced Jonathan McIntosh’s lightning talk, which comes emerges from his OVC 2010 remix of Donald Duck and Glenn Beck, “Right Wing Radio Duck.” Jonathan will also be one of the session leaders heading up the working group Making a Remix Maker, scheduled for Saturday at 10:30.

Jonathan will join Martin Leduc and Boaz Sender in a working group focused on building intuitive, accessible open source tools to make remixing easier. This session builds on the “Gendered Advertising Remixer Application” (GAR), created by Jonathan and Kaltura at last year’s OVC.

The GAR used drag-and-drop interface to allow users to easily participate in one focused remixing task – swapping the audio and video of toy ads directed at boys or girls. The project uses remixing to highlight the stereotypically gendered approach of ads directed at young children, and importantly opens up this investigation to all kinds of remixers, whether or not they’re familiar with digital video editing tools.

Making remix accessible is important because, as the session leaders highlight, “Making video remixes involves a lot of skills that have nothing to do with editing.” A critical eye for media and a sense of the underlying, potentially surprising themes and connections between disparate pieces of media is as essential for creating an incisive video remix as technical skill.

This session will also open up a discussion about the future of remixes — including the possible downsides of making simple tools such as the loss of important tech skills in the remix community, or the potential for the commodification of remix culture. This session will be a valuable place for remix artists, media critics, designers, coders, and many others with a stake in remix culture to share their perspectives.

We’re really excited to see the results of this session. Registration for OVC 2011 ends today, so be sure to register now.

Last year Jonathan McIntosh managed to bring the Open Video Conference to Glenn Beck’s attention with his video “Right Wing Radio Duck”. This remix mashed up bunch of vintage Donald Duck cartoons with clips from Beck’s radio show to tell the tale of one average American duck’s post-recession descent into paranoia.

The remix quickly went viral, attracting tweets from the likes of Roger Ebert, John Cusack, and even Bill O’Reilly, and its own remixes. It also came to Beck’s attention, who, as Jonathan says, “devoted a full 10 minutes of his show to denouncing the video while spinning an elaborate conspiracy theory about how it was plot against him involving ‘communist unions,’ the stimulus package, the NEA and the White House.”

In response to Beck’s investigation, Jonathan responded with a Popcorn.js project that dynamically sourced the origins of each clip used in the video. This, he says, “allows viewers to follow media fragments back to their original source to see them in their original context,” and make up their own mind about Beck’s criticism of the video.

As part of such a major moment in OVC history, we’re excited to announce that Jonathan will be delivering a lightning talk at 10 AM this Saturday — just one of the great speakers that will help us kick off the weekend’s festivities.

Jonathan says he’ll be addressing “how remix video fits into the larger open video and participatory culture projects” at his talk. OVC attendees can also expect a brief report on the best responses to “Right Wing Radio Duck” — including this video, which Jonathan cites as one of his favorites, where Mickey Mouse gets embroiled in the remix conspiracy — and the premiere of a new short remix he describes as “humorously addressing the gender imbalance on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Aside from the lightning talk, Jonathan will also be one of the facilitators of Saturday’s session Making a Remix Maker — stay tuned for more updates on this session later today.

Don’t miss this great speaker — today is your last chance to register online for the OVC!

Be sure to register by the end of the day, otherwise you’ll be missing out on a weekend packed with cool stuff like:

Amazing Keynotes…

• A keynote from Jillian York of EFF
• A lightning talk with Jonathan McIntosh of Rebellious Pixels
• Cindy Gallop’s thought provoking talk on Make Love Not Porn
• A keynote from Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge
• Brewster Kahle and Tracey Jaquith on Archive.org’s 9/11 Archive
• Marvin Ammori on threats to open video

Great Exhibits…

• An exhibit from Archive.org’s 9/11 TV News Archive
• A jailbreak station – we will help you jailbreak your Apple device!
• Ridley Scott’s collaborative documentary “Life in a Day”

And all our awesome working groups and sessions, including:

• An intro to Popcorn.js
• Making the Map of the open video ecosystem
• Visual privacy and the SecureSmartCam
• A discussion of the Rebecca Black phenomenon

Those are just a few of the events taking place this weekend, so register today!

Open video is based on the concepts of sharing, including source code, ideas, applications, best practices and standards. This movement promotes collaboration and open communication, free expression and innovation in the online video space. Simple as this sounds, the open video ecosystem can be a difficult landscape to traverse. It is comprised of multiple layers, involving the (un)coordinated work of various entities, including content creators, Internet service providers (ISPs), content distribution platforms, aggregators, and ultimately, the end user. Advanced technology, which has opened the door for comprehensive innovation in layers such as content creation and bandwidth, and the often overlapping nature of key players, continually adds new dimensions to the ecosystem.

As the Internet becomes a ubiquitous part of our lives, it’s easy to take these complex technologies and networks for granted. This has led to consequences such as regulatory asymmetry and undue reliance on traditional media models. At the same time, technologists often don’t understand the reasoning or hierarchies behind policymaking. By visualizing each layer and its context within the whole video landscape, a map of the video ecosystem will help to close the comprehension gap and create new avenues for collaboration and participation.

At this year’s OVC, we’ll try to make sense of it all. Marvin Ammori and Nicholas Bramble will lead a multi-part workshop to make a comprehensive infographic. They’ll be joined by sketchnoter Amanda Lyons (VISUALS for CHANGE), who will lend her artistic ability to help lay the foundation for the map, and a cast of experts from across the regulatory, software, and content spectrum, including policymakers, video makers, distributors, investors, and developers. The graphic will illustrate how different layers of the open video ecosystem, from devices and bandwidth, to software and standards, and filmmaking and distribution, fit together—and what kinds of legal, competitive, or creative constraints are in place at each layer. In creating this map and refining our understanding of the economics and the infrastructure of the open video ecosystem, we will develop a better sense of how to interact with a variety of public and private design levers important to the future of open video.

Plus, it will look cool.

Register by Wednesday for OVC 2011.

Don’t forget to register to join us – the last day to register online is Wednesday!

According to some statistics, 12% of sites on the net are pornographic. 25% of all search engine requests are pornographic. And 35% of all internet downloads are pornographic.

Porn is the 800 pound gorilla in the world of online video, and we’re delighted that Cindy Gallop will be talking about what it means at this year’s Open Video Conference.

Cindy Gallop delivered one of the most talked about TEDTalks in history at TED 2009.

Speaking very frankly, and from direct experience, she argued that hardcore pornography has distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex.

At TED 2009, Cindy shared with attendees her plan to fight back, with the launch of a website to educate people about the nuances in human sexuality. At OVC, she’ll start to share the next part of her project: MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, which launches in early 2012.

How do amateurs, independent and niche producers fit into the ecosystem? How can porn be a diverse and sex-positive experience? What’s porn’s place in our media space?

Cindy is not anti-porn, or about judging what’s good or what is bad. Her project is intended to stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography.

This talk will be frank. This talk will be honest. It will be graphic. But we think Cindy speaks to a hugely under-recognized issue, and does so in a funny and thought-provoking way.

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.

Many of our attendees at this year’s OVC come representing great projects of their own. One project that we’re excited to see develop is Zeega, a tool that facilitates the creation of participatory documentaries without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Kara Oehler, one of Zeega’s founders, and its new lead developer, Joseph Bergen, filled us in on Zeega’s origins and where it’s headed.

How did Zeega get started?

Zeega was founded in 2010 by journalist Kara Oehler, media artist Jesse Shapins, and creative technologist James Burns. The team first started working together while developing Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary co-created with radio producer Ann Heppermann and funded through the Association of Independents in Radio’s MQ2 initiative with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

We queried Google and census data, and found that more than 10,466 streets are named Main. With this database of streets as its starting point, we built and designed www.mappingmainstreet.org, an online platform that combines NPR documentaries with photos, videos and stories contributed by others.

We see Mapping Main Street as a new form of documentary that combines all these different elements into a website that “plays” like a video, but that is constantly changing through user input and interaction. We built Mapping Main Street from scratch while also producing stories for NPR. But ultimately, to pull it off, Kara had to put her stuff in storage and live out of her car for the summer. Afterwards, we decided people shouldn’t have to give up their homes to make collaborative documentaries.

What kinds of stories can people create with Zeega?

Zeega will enable anyone to create participatory projects that combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps via APIs from across the web. But Zeega is not just an online documentary toolkit. Integral to the project is the ability to bridge physical and digital worlds. Zeega will be a community and framework for creative invention, making it possible for people to pioneer new forms of storytelling that have not yet been imagined.

So far, we’ve undertaken a few early-stage tests into HTML5 video through Sensate, a new journal for experiments in critical media practice. Jeffrey Schnapp and Kara Oehler developed a mash-up called “the first spoken arts record you can dance to.” The project uses the first 5 minutes of the 1968 LP Medium is the Massage as a baseline that is annotated with video clips dynamically drawn from across the web. Joana Pimenta’s Revere Double Exposure uses Zeega to combine archival materials from the Revere Beach Historical Society with contemporary recordings and Google Street View. In both cases, all media plays back natively through the video tag and the editing was done through Zeega’s web-based interface.

How does Zeega make it possible to bridge physical and digital media?

Before Zeega, Jesse Shapins and Kara Oehler were working on Yellow Arrow, a seminal project in locative media that involved cities, stickers, mobile phones, and participants in over 450 cities in 39 countries, transforming the urban landscape into a “deep map” that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces. Participants placed uniquely-coded Yellow Arrow stickers to draw attention to different locations and objects. By sending an SMS from a mobile phone to the Yellow Arrow number beginning with the arrow’s unique code, Yellow Arrow authors connected a story to the location where they placed their sticker. When another person encountered the Yellow Arrow, he or she sent its code to the Yellow Arrow number and immediately received the message on their mobile phone. The website yellowarrow.net extended this location-based exchange, by allowing participants to annotate their arrows with photos and maps in the online gallery of Yellow Arrows placed throughout the world. Mapping Main Street had many of the same characteristics – in order to participate in the project, people had to physically go to a street named Main Street and document it, either with photos, videos or audio.

So far, Zeega has been developed through a series of experiments with documentarians, libraries, educational institutions, architects and others. Through a course at Harvard called the Mixed-Reality City,student Kat Tang wanted to create a project where people could stand outside of a building and hear the interior or inaccessible sounds of that particular space. She designed a system where people would see a sticker on a building with an invitation to text a unique code to a telephone number. When someone texts the code to the number, he or she gets a phone call back with an audio recording that Kat made inside that building. When one hangs up, he or she gets a text message that explains the audio recording. (While the project is meant to be experienced on location, you can test it from anywhere by following these instructions). Kat used the web-based Zeega interface to create this project by simply defining the sequence of interactions and adding her audio recordings and texts. She didn’t do any programming. And now anyone can create similar projects combining stickers, audio and text via mobile phones to tell stories on location.

What’s next for Zeega?

Zeega received a grant from the Knight News Challenge this year. Right now, we’re hiring for a Director of Projects and Community Partnerships and shortly, we’ll be announcing a call for journalists, news organizations, artists, community groups, filmmakers, librarians, scholars and others to create Zeega pilot projects. To sign up to get updates and become a beta tester, visit our website: zeega.org.

What are you looking forward to at this year’s OVC?

Zeega’s new lead developer, Joseph Bergen, will be lurking around the OVC this year. Says Joseph:

“I’m really looking forward to the interactive and creative sessions being offered at OVC. It will be really great to see how Zeega fits into the larger picture of open media on the web, how we can improve it, and how we can best contribute to the ever growing, and increasingly diverse community. However, probably the most compelling part of the whole event will be meeting, talking, and listening to the people who are thinking about, creating, and innovating in the field.

I’m a very hands on type of person, so I’m looking forward to their “less yak, more hack” philosophy and taking part in the working group sessions. specifically ‘The Connected Documentary’, ‘Alternate and Augmented Reality Storyworlds’, ‘Database-Driven Narratives’ (pretty spot on).”

We’re really looking forward to the Zeega team’s participation in this year’s OVC. Register today to join in on the conversation at all our great sessions, activities, and events.

Interested in Popcorn.js, the HTML5 framework that integrates web content into video? This year’s Open Video Conference offers the perfect venue to dive in, with the session “Intro to Popcorn.js.”

This session will be led by Rick Waldron, javascript ninja for Bocoup, and a core contributor to Popcorn since version 0.2. You’ll get a brief overview of what Popcorn is, and why you might be interested in using it—whether you’re a filmmaker, developer, or just curious. From there, you’ll jump into a quick tutorial that will take you through the basics of writing and implementing Popcorn.

At the end of the session, participants will be invited to pitch ideas for Popcorn.js plugins they’d like to create or use—whether for mashing web video in new ways or for specific productions. This lays the groundwork for the same-day “Popcorn.js Plugin Sprint” session, an open-ended hackfest where groups will work to build out their ideas and present them to fellow attendees.

These sessions are great opportunity for developers, filmmakers, and others across a variety of fields and technological skill levels to check out what popcorn can do. Check out the demos at Popcornjs.org to see Popcorn in action.

Register for OVC today to grab a seat at this and all our other great sessions.

One of the key issues facing creators on the Web is the question of compensation. While open Web and video technologies invite a wide new base of creators to participate, they also may appear to carry a major disincentive – a lack of compensation that would support these creators’ future work.

At 2011 Open Video Conference, we’ll be tackling this major issue in a working group on Alternative Currencies and Transaction Models working group. Holmes Wilson of the Participatory Culture Foundation will lead the session with the goal of creating a workable blueprint for a standardized compensation service for creators – a vital necessity for ensuring that filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, and many others can continue to be supported in their efforts on the open Web.

Though micropayments have begun to take off in the public consciousness, there is no set standard ensuring that anyone, regardless of circumstance, business- or tech-savvy will be fairly compensated for the success of their creative efforts online. Though there are a variety of digital marketplaces, ‘tip jar’ services, crowd-funding sites, and other payment models, there’s also a significant burden on creators to identify, navigate, and choose between these possibilities.

Wilson says that in the present moment it seems that “the right combination of free software and open standards could solve the ‘get creators paid directly’ problem in a pretty definitive way.” While a lack of infrastructure has hampered a standard compensation model, the increasingly well-known Bitcoin digital currency may address this problem in significant ways.

“Bitcoin represents an immense simplification of the problem of moving money online, from the point of view of somebody building a service,” says Wilson. “It’s a software-only solution. You don’t have to negotiate anything or deal with a bureaucracy to make your idea a reality.”

Wilson notes that Bitcoin also represents new opportunities that go beyond electronic representations of real-world currency: “It works everywhere in the world at once, and the fact that there are no transaction costs opens up a whole new set of possibilities. Plus it’s free and open source, so if there was something that was possible theoretically but not in practice, you could propose it to the community.”

At the OVC, the Alternative Currencies and Transaction Models working group is looking to bring together people with experience working on payment services and Bitcoin applications, as well as creators who have had success funding their work through micropayments, donations, and other digital transactions. Getting input from those with expertise in tech, business, policy and the creative realm will be essential for making important steps toward a standard that works for everyone.

Register today to join in on this and all other OVC 2011 sessions! Attendees also get a tote bag full of great stuff and lunches on Saturday and Sunday.

For most Americans, the 9/11 attacks unfolded through indelible images from television news. As the tenth anniversary of the attacks nears, these news broadcasts make up an immensely valuable, yet difficult to access record of history. In 2001, YouTube was three years away, many homes were still equipped with dial-up connections, and the significance and accessibility of online video was very limited. This means that most scholars’ ability to seek out, access, and cite television broadcast, even for events of massive significance such as 9/11, remains challenging.

The 9/11 Television News Archive is a project created by the Internet Archive. A mini-conference at NYU launched the project on Wednesday, bringing together a number of experts and scholars to discuss how television news shapes our perspectives on unfolding history and how we can preserve these media resources for future study.

The Internet Archive has been recording and archiving TV from 20 channels across many countries since early 2000, yet only a small fraction of it has been restored thus far. The Archive’s focus is on gathering news, which has become and will continue to be an invaluable source of historical-cultural information. Preserving these programs means creating a repository of unbiased data for future scholars looking to cite the records found in television’s perspective on important events.

The 9/11 Television Archive stands as an example of where these kinds of archives might be headed, as well as an indicator of its challenges – particularly over the course of a decade in which video and technology changed rapidly. Restoring the data of just one week’s worth of breaking news surrounding the event took two engineers over three weeks. The shows were on digital linear tape, since hard drives were too expensive in the early part of the decade, and were preserved in raw, unlabeled MPEG-PS format, with separate text files describing the file contents. Corruption issues over time further complicated the task, ultimately resulting in restoration of 93% of the available footage.

At this year’s conference, the archive will be accessible through a uniquely visual touchscreen interface. We are pleased to announce that this exhibit will be available at the 2011 OVC for attendees to experience. Stay tuned for more announcements from the Internet Archive at OVC.

Register today for the OVC.

In 1996, Congress took a big step towards increasing competition in the world of cable television. Following in the footsteps of FCC decisions that made it so you didn’t need to rent your phone from the telephone company or get your computer approved by your ISP, Congress told the FCC to put an end to the requirement that cable customers rent their set top boxes from the cable company.

Unfortunately CableCARD, the FCC’s first attempt to pry the cable boxes away from cable companies, did not work very well. CableCARDs never quite worked as well as they should have, the FCC regularly undermined them with waivers, and the vast majority of Americans kept renting their clunky cable boxes from the cable company.

Recently, the FCC decided to take another shot. The initiative, called AllVid, is designed to allow you to access your cable (and satellite) programming however you want without needing a clunky box. Your TV could have its own program guide that was updated since the end of the Soviet era. TV could be integrated into your phone, or your iPad, or your Xbox. Instead of one way to see what was available, devices and devs could compete to create the fastest, best looking, most intuitive program interface.

And, of course, that interface could show you more than just your cable subscription. Want to integrate web video? Go for it. Turn on your TV and see a mix of cable, YouTube, Revision3, and Netflix. Pick a movie and get a list of places to buy it from. Seamlessly switch between watching a live football game and a video of a hamster on a piano. Imagine Boxee with live TV.

This is the promise of AllVid. The AllVid gateway would act like a modem, transforming different kinds of cable or satellite feeds into a single, universal video standard. Any device on your home network could access the video and integrate it into its own interface.

Strangely enough, the recently announced merger of Google and Motorola Mobility may help move the AllVid process forward. One of the problems for AllVid proponents (of which Google has traditionally been, and Motorola had not been) was that most cable companies were locked into Motorola set top boxes. The cable companies claimed that the nature of the Motorola standards made implementing AllVid all but impossible. Now that Google owns Motorola, we may find that there are some fairly simple ways to solve those technical problems.

That could lead to a new push for AllVid. Now we need to decide exactly how we want AllVid to work. In a perfect world, what would a truly integrated video interface look like? What information should the AllVid standard include? What should it exclude? What is the best way to bring together all video content from all sources in one interface?

We’re pleased to announce that the Yale Law School Information Society Project has joined as a supporter of the 2011 Open Video Conference.

The Yale ISP is an intellectual center at Yale Law School that addresses the implications of the Internet and new information technologies for law and society, guided by the values of democracy, human development, and social justice. As a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, the Yale ISP has provided invaluable support and guidance to past OVCs, and we couldn’t be happier to have them along for the ride this year! As a fully non-profit event, support from organizations like the Yale ISP is critical to our ability to deliver an engaging and thought-provoking program. The Yale ISP will lend a unique perspective to OVC and allow us to better explore aspects of open video such as:

• Protecting and expanding access to knowledge.
• Developing legal rules, policy frameworks, and technical architectures to promote civil liberties online.
• Providing teachers and students with better access to digital education
• Encouraging intellectual property reform and innovation.

At this year’s OVC, we’re striving to answer important questions on issues like these that will shape the future of video on the Web. We’re looking forward to working with the Yale ISP to meet our shared goals.

Be sure to register today for this year’s conference!

Here are just a few recent developments at this year’s OVC:

• Keynotes by Marvin Ammori and Jillian York
• Working groups on legal, policy, and creative issues
• A jailbreak station for your iPod, iPhone, or iPad
• Tons of sessions on HTML5, WebGL, and new web technologies
• A screening of the crowdsourced documentary “Life in a Day.”
• much more to come.

Time is running out and space is limited, so be sure to register today for access to all conference events, lunch on Saturday and Sunday, and a tote bag of awesome stuff.

There are a lot of great folks already registered to attend this year’s Open Video Conference. One of the guests we’re excited to see is Mr. Doob. You’ve probably seen his work in visual projects for the Web, including last year’s personalized, Web-based video project for Arcade Fire, The Wilderness Downtown. We caught up with Mr. Doob to ask him a few questions about his past work and what he’s excited to dive into.

When did you start hacking with WebGL?

I think around October last year. Before then I had been toying with software rendering for some years and before that I spent many years creating content for DirectX/OpenGL realtime demos.

Which one of your projects was your favorite to work on, and why?

Probably ROME. The whole process was very similar to doing realtime demos so I had a lot of tricks and knowledge I could use. However, we had to do a lot of things from scratch and the experience was a bit intense.

Who would you want to collaborate with on a future project?

With the whole internet!

What developments are you looking forward to in the open web/video space?

Adoption of the WebM format by Microsoft and Apple. Alpha channel support would be good too, and being able to access the user’s webcam.

Mr. Doob is just one of the awesome people attending this year’s OVC who will be lending their expertise to our outcomes-oriented sessions. Register today to get access to all conference sessions and activities, where there will be lots of great opportunities to network with cool people like Mr. Doob.