EngageMedia is pleased to announce a Plone Video Sprint at this years Plone Conference in Budapest, Hungary. We’ll be partnering with Aspiration and Plone4Artists to put on a 4-day sprint for developers to collaborate on open video technologies on the Plone CMS. The sprint will take place from 31st October 2009 to 3rd November 2009, directly after the conference.
Online video has exploded in recent years, being a major source of the ‘web 2.0’ boom. YouTube, Yahoo Video and other video sharing spaces have been celebrated for making major advances in facilitating citizen media. Despite their success, however, there are many limitations to these proprietary platforms, such as YouTube’s limit on video size, its frequent censorship, the difficulty in downloading the video, the low quality of the flash video employed, the terms of use that allows YouTube to do near anything with your video, etc.
The ability to host and manage your own content using free, libre and open-source (FLOSS) tools is essential for independent media organisations and non-profits.
Topics and Aims
The aims for the sprint are the following
- Increased communication and collaboration between Python, Zope and Plone developers working in the area of open video technologies.
- Direct improvement of key video technologies and the video feature set available in the Plone CMS so as to increase uptake and improve those sites already implementing Plone video technologies.
- Improved the ease of use, install and set up of Plumi via technical and documentation enhancements, opening it up to a broader set of users and contributors.
- Increased skill set among sprint participants regarding how to implement and develop with the Plumi CMS and for video
technologies more generally in the Plone CMS. - Increase the community of developers working on Plone and video and their effectiveness.
We will be guided by a professional facilitator to help the group focus on priorities. Broadly we aim to work on the following topic areas: building a shared roadmap for video on Plone, working on key technical needs such as large file handling, transcoding and BitTorrent support, improving support for FOSS video codecs, publishing and viewing content with mobile devices, bug fixing existing video related Plone collective products and improving documentation.
We hope to follow up related work from around the FLOSS video scene – such as Transmission.cc network, Plone4Artists, the recent Open Video Conference in NYC, the annual set of FOMS conferences, and the free documentation work of FLOSSManuals.
We aim to contribute to constructing online spaces where independent media networks can flourish in an open, accessible and transparent way. For our part, EngageMedia will continue work on Plumi – the Plone based video CMS sponsored by us as a FLOSS tool for local communities and activists to use as a democratic online video sharing space.
Participating
The Plone Conference has subsidies for people wanting to come to the conference.
http://ploneconf2009.org/blog/apply-for-participation-grants
EngageMedia also has a very limited number of travel subsidies to offer to activists and NGO developers based on need. When you contact us, please also let us know by September 6th if you want to be considered for a travel subsidy.
The Plone Video sprint has a limited number of places, and you will need to register, and please indicate how long for the 4 days you can stay. We have a preference for people to stay for the entire 4 days. Please add yourself to the team at http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plone-video-sprint/request-membership and also drop [email protected] an email.
We will close the list of sprint participants at the end of September 30th.
The Plone/Video Sprint is supported by the Open Society Institute
