MediaProxy:

Overview

Description:
Copyleft multimedia distribution and transcoding network.

Goal:
Help multimedia producers network, collaborate, archive media, showcase, and communicate.

Nature and Quantity:
Multimedia content will include photographs, video, audio, 3D assets and other metadata as well as multimedia source files (working formats.)

Community:
The community should incorporate the general public, artists, documenters, students, and hobbyists.

Budget and Timetable:
OpenRain has provided a quote of $11k to piece together the application framework using Software Libre libraries and creating new code where necessary.

WebFaction has donated one year of Rails capable hosting, which expires November of 2009.

Features:

Platform: Passenger

• Parallel-processing and File Distribution: Hadoop

• Open-Access social network.

• Direct-to-producer micro-financing.

• Cross-posting to existing media community frameworks.

• Collection mirroring in regional file repositories.

• Meta-data organization and search indexing:
  o comments
  o ratings
  o Geolocation (OpenLayers)
  o Timestamps (from EXIF, upload, and/or user)
  o Names of people in item.
  o Keywords
  o Contact info. (Profile link)
  o License(s)

• ‘Real-time’ communications

• Nested-forums:
  o each post is a node for comment branching.

• Organic/ad hoc groups.
  o Collaboration
  o asset collections or discussions

• Versioning system with rollback and/or branching.

• Media display, playback, and retrieval:
  o categorized/keyword browsing
  o popular works
  o similar works (meta-links;anonymous ‘viewing’ trends)
  o time/location browsing
  o download (flexible protocols; different quality levels including source file access)

• XML meta-feeds (customizable criteria)
  *Promote the use of Free protocols, tools, and codecs through:
  o Tutorials
  o Transcoding (distributed)
  o Framework integration such as: XMPP, OpenID, OpenSocial
• SVG/JavaScript embeddable media player for the Ogg Vorbis audio format.

Roadmap

1. Milestone One (Community Platform: Social presence and colleague networking)
2. Milestone Two (Contributions Interface: Submit content to Copyleft repositories)
3. Milestone Three (Collaboration Network: Resource indexing and artifact retrieval)
4. Milestone Four (Coordination Tools: Groupware/Project Management)

Larryvillage.org:

Here is a feature list:

• Community events calendar.

  • iCal support.

  • User submission.

  • Categories

• Multimedia submission: Web File Manager

  • Comments

  • Ratings

  • Geolocation (USGS, OpenStreetMaps, OpenLayers or other open map data overlay)

  • Timestamps (from EXIF, upload, and/or user)

  • Names of people in item.

  • Keywords (AJAX auto-complete)

  • License(s) selection (or else a blanketing Creative Commons license)

  • Versioning system with rollback and/or branching.

  • Collaboration such as Kaltura plugin.

• Article submission.

  • WYSIWYG editor.

  • Inline spell-check

  • Auto-save as draft.

• Personal profiles.
  **Skills for hire

  • Resume fields.

  • Site ‘karma’ (forum posts, item submissions, &c)

• ‘Real-time’ communications (chat)

• Nested-forums:

  • each post is a node for comment branching.

• Organic/ad hoc groups.

  • Collaboration

  • asset collections or discussion groups

• Media display, playback, and retrieval:

  • categorized/keyword browsing

  • popular works

  • similar works (meta-links;anonymous ‘viewing’ trends)

  • time/location browsing

  • download (flexible protocols [e.g. simple HTTP or FTP]; different
    quality levels including source file access)

  • XML meta-feeds (customizable criteria)

• Framework integration such as: XMPP, OpenID, OpenSocial

• Wiki-like community information directory.

This framework should allow anonymous access and participation as much as
possible, while taking measures to prevent abuse (e-mail harvesting, &c)
and SPAM. This should not be a walled garden, license-wise or by requiring
registration to access core components.

A sample use case for file submission:
Brylie gets footage of the Lawrence Art In the Park festival. He goes to
http://larryvillage.org to submit the footage. He is asked to categorize
his submission by navigating to the section which is most relevant or by
selecting from a dropdown list. While the files are uploading,
meta-information is filed including descriptions and other required
meta-data adhering to Dublin Core or other standards. This information is
kept alongside (or embedded into) the corresponding multimedia items for
archival purposes.

Use case for file retrieval:
Katherine wants to find out what events occurred at South Park last
weekend. She clicks the Map Search button and is presented with an aerial
view of Lawrence. She selects a location for her search by dragging the map
to the location and a timeframe by adjusting a time slider or dropdown
boxes. The map is populated with pinpoints showing events, multimedia, and
stories related to/confined within her criteria.

Katherine sees that there was a concert, “Music in the Park”, and wants to
see videos of prior concerts. She clicks the keyword tag(s) on certain
search results and changes the context of her search to a broader
timeframe, showing only concerts. She is presented with further map results
as well as an archival list (including RSS feed) for her criteria.

Use case for journal entry and news article.
Jason attends a conference about the Wetlands Conservation initiative.
Several noteworthy speakers attend and present a compelling case for the
preservation of the Wakarusa Wetlands. Jason wants to share his notes with
the general public.

Jason navigates to the News section of larryvillage.org and clicks “submit
news”. He is presented with a WYSIWYG text editor with inline spell
checking in order to type up his story. He inserts pictures of two of the
speakers and a beautiful view of the wetlands. Jason submits the article
and it is published immediately (with ‘mark as spam’, or ‘flag for abuse’
designators for the viewing public).

Jason also decides that a personal journal entry is desirable and posts a
brief explanation of his involvement with EcoJustice and describing the
article he just published. This journal entry shows up on Jason’s personal
blog (e.g. http://larryvillage/community/jason) as well as optionally being
cross-posted to several social news sites.

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