Video archive of the US Congress
The US House, having just passed the stimulus package after hours of contentious debates and procedural motions, moved on to more serious business: congratulating the winners of the Super Bowl. Here’s a short clip of somebody off-camera airing their opinion. This somehow didn’t make it into the official record. The gem is @01:26.
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At present, the #1 most discussed political clip on YouTube is a very short 16 second clip of Chuck Schumer claiming Americans don’t care about pork barrel spending.
The neat thing about Metavid is that because we archive the full day of proceedings, we can take that same 16 second clip and expand coverage from either side and provide context to an otherwise self-encapsulated sound byte. Here we can see Chuck’s quote as part of a larger rhetorical flourish; he calls for the removal of the pork spending and highlights what he sees are the important elements of the bill. Here is the the clip on Metavid:
Furthermore we can expand to see Schumer’s entire speech on Metavid: And even the full day of debate.
The ability to dig deeper and investigate a given argument that is being presented is fundamental to understanding what is really taking place. This is why a citation framework for web video is so important for healthy deliberation. This way, the context (and contextualization) of a given source document can be investigated. Tools like Metavid open up this citation process for continued dialog in contrast to allowing the clip fragment to act as the final word.
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The Metavid Archive has captured video and text captions from cable broadcasts of public domain house and senate footage since 2006. We have made all this content available for search and reuse in an entirely open source video platform. But the archive is not perfect, over-the-air cable broadcasts do not provide perfect sync for close captions, and live transcription is not 100% accurate.
We are now calling on visitors to share and promote the Metavid site in order to build a more perfect archive. Specifically, we are asking people to try and spend a few minutes of their time to try out the transcript improving tools. For more help on how the transcript improving process works, check out the improving transcript accuracy help section here on the wiki.
To find a transcript to improve simply search for the issue your interested in be it Iraq, Afghanistan waterboarding, telecoms immunity, FISA, Guantanamo, same-sex marriage, immigration, or the recent bailout debate. Or pull clips up by people. If you find a transcript slightly out of sync simply adjust it, that way it will be perfectly in sync for the next person 
Improving transcript segments goes a long way here on metavid because the metavid platform builds on the most powerful collaborative knowledge production platforms in existence: mediaWiki (the software that powers wikipedia), and semantic mediaWiki a powerful structured data extension to mediaWiki. Your freedom to collaborative is protected by creative commons by-sa license ensuring your freedom to reuse the archive in its entirety for any purpose as long as you don’t prevent others from doing the same.
The More Perfect Archive We are Building
These same improved transcripts are carried over when people embed posts in blogs, enhancing the content accessibility. The transcript is exportable in the open cmml timed text format it can be muxed with the ogg stream for archival distribution and is easily searched as the text is directly in the page or accessible in machine readable CMML. (not hidden or encapsulated in a proprietary player like the approach of some flash subtitle sites) Annotative layers can categorize larger stream segments of video enhancing searchability and contextualization of media segments.
Since your participation in the metavid archive semantically tags time segments and we scrape information from a half dozen open congress sites; with your participation powerful semantic queries become possible.
The site give users powerful tools to create pages that highlight particular issues for example see the bailout coverage page, and provides endless mashup opportunities. We will continue to improve the archive as we make edits to transcripts. We will continue improve the underling open source software and hopefully lay the groundwork for future collaborative video archive projects. How perfect an archive metavid becomes is only dependent on our imagination and collective participation.
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The Personal Democracy Forum conference is under way here in NY. A lot of really cool projects and talks I particularly liked Clay Shirky’s talk summarizing his new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. In questioning the structure of current online political mobilization he highlighted the network capacity to build a new rather simply act in reaction to or attempt to open existing power structures. As an example Linus did not protest outside of Microsoft office for them to build a better OS, and Jimmy Wales did not throw stones at Britannica until they became more open. He points to new incorporations and ways to organize groups of people without rigid hierarchy or centralization.
In the context of video technologies there were some interesting projects as well. Remixamerica.org was showing their platform for remixing and promoting political videos using the open kaltura video editor. We will see about adding the metavid archive as a source for remixes Also mogulus was showing off their platform for realtime video broadcasting from a small portable nokia camara.
I will be giving a short demo of Metavid Tuesday afternoon.
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This Thursday and Friday the politics web 2.0 conference is taking place in London. Metavid is presenting on Friday. From the site:
Has there been a shift in political use of the internet and digital new media - a new web 2.0 politics based on participatory values? How do broader social, cultural, and economic shifts towards web 2.0 impact, if at all, on the contexts, the organizational structures, and the communication of politics and policy? Does web 2.0 hinder or help democratic citizenship? This conference provides an opportunity for researchers to share and debate perspectives.
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Carl Malamud & Tim O’Reilly hosted an open government meeting in Sebastopol CA which was very productive. Principals of Open Government Data were established and strategies for pushing openness in the current government data environment where shared. Metavid Wiki was presented in the short demos section of the meeting.
From the announcement:
This weekend, 30 open government advocates gathered to develop a set of principles of open government data. The meeting, held in Sebastopol, California, was designed to develop a more robust understanding of why open government data is essential to democracy.
The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.
The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.
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Al Gore was on the Daily Show last night and had a good interview with Stewart. Gore criticizes the news/tv medium for its efforts to relate Congregational conversations to citizens. Television is a broken system that produces a one way conversation. Here is a snippet from the show.
(the full segment is on comedy central.com part1, part2, or if you want a copy you can edit goggle may help you)
Gore like others sees potential for improvement of these system of communication and governance via “The Internet”. In this respect Gore highlights the problems that we hope metavid will help address. Mainly making Congressional video more accessible and re-usable. We can imply by Gore criticism of television as a one way conversation that when he says “the Internet” he means the kind of Internet Lessig describes, a participatory read-write web. In software metaphors the existing television system is read only, closed source and proprietary. So if we aim to address this problem our social software design decisions should be informed by the ideals of free software and participatory culture. see metavid thesis
Gore goes on to say this Internet potential was not actualized in 2003. While true the� invasion, occupation and total devastation of Iraq was not prevented :(… more than a million people in the US and around 10 million people worldwide did hit the streets to try and stop it. This un-paralleled mass action was enabled in no small part by the improved social communication infrastructure. If we are to hail improvements in communication infrastructure as the savior of our democracy it would be good to highlight not only what “the media, the President, Congress, and CIA”, did wrong, but also what the people did right.
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Let me be the first to call for more nursery rhymes on the floor of congress. I’ve been looking through ‘One Minute Speeches’ for gems, and found this one:
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Let me be the first to call for more nursery rhymes on the floor of congress. I’ve been looking through ‘One Minute Speeches’ for gems, and found this one:
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Following the slashdot post poiting out the lack of open media support on the EU media site. I wrote them a short open letter pointing out metavid and calling for their support for open media.
I noticed your FAQ mentioning the following question:
On which platforms can I view the live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union?
The live streaming media service of the Council of the European Union can be viewed on Microsoft Windows and Macintosh platforms. We cannot support Linux in a legal way. So the answer is: No support for Linux
I was curious if your development staff had see our metavid project. (metavid.org) This project archives legislative proceeding in the US and makes them available for searching and participant re-use. The content can be viewed on all platforms as its encoded with the open source patent free codec ogg theora. It can be viewed in the web browser via java or other plugins. Ogg theora is vender neutral, an open platform and reusable. Our entire platform is open source and available for reuse. If you have any questions feel free to email us.
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MetaVid is a non-profit project of UC Santa Cruz and the Sunlight Foundation.