Published Date 11/3/12 12:38 AM

DRAFT – thinking about Social networking

OK we need to look agen at what we will use our CMS for – here is a look at the social networking side of it.

Create A network:

– around films

– around filmmakers

– around channels

– around campaigns

– list of filmmakers

– archive of films (tagged database)

– Subjects are channels

– Campaigns are action pages which are based round users/groups – the is a dynamic intro process for users and campaign organizers. It could use a goggle maps and meet up API’s mash-up to create physical groupings around subjects/users. Could be based on twitter use twitter API to create our own interface. Can use open ID to login to all…

 We need to right up some user experiences to help the programmers to visualize what needs to be in our CMS. Can people write up short user experiences like these – need at least 3 from each of you.

User Jane

She heres about VOTV from a friend and watches a few films on the website. She likes what she finds so installs the VOTV app.

 It’s a easy install, after leaving her computer on over night she starts to watch the shows – installing the headmix and global views channel. Based on what she watches – votes up or down in 2 days the CMS asks her if she is interested in a filmmaker (or channel) if she says yes it takes her to that page on the CMS – she has the option to join the groups that are connected to this page (subjects) – the first time she dose this it will ask for her open ID account (will create one if she doesn’t have one). By joining a group it mashes this groups RSS feed into her news on her personal home page and links her as a member.

She can create blog/calendar/wiki etc on her personal page and share these with other groups/users. Ie that is her home page can become a campaign or subject page – each user page can become a social network.

User Jim

 He is a regular user of VOTV and is inspired by the offlineTV show to create a hacklabe in his local town of Swindon to show the best of activist tec films in his local pub on Wednesday night – they have a projector and PA installed and the landlord is friendly and desperate to sell some beer as Wednesday is a very slow night. He creates a new home page from his VOTV page called the “Swindon Geeks Revolt” using the blog to setup intro, contact and about pages and a wiky which members can edit to add film suggestions and subjects for talks. From his VOTV home page he will have a list of all the people who are interested in these subjects in his area – he messages then to invite then to the first meet up – 7 of them join the SGR group so can then message each other directly and add suggestions for futer events to the wiky. One of the group sets up a forum on VOTV around open source software and Linux. Jim advertises the event vie a free tag in the EAS (ethical advertising system) “Swindon + offlineTV” 14 people tern up to learn about umbunto and open office. Next week a screening of “the pirates of silicon valley” is organized.

User Jenny

Is a activist filmmaker who is involved in a tree protest in central oxford – she edits a long wobbly cam 8 min film which she shows to the protesters in the local community centre bar on reggae night. One of the VOTV crew Turnip sees the film and points her to the VOTV help page on how to make a short news report – she cuts the film down to 2 mins and adds some context so that it is accessible to a wider ordnance. This then goes out to 20K people on the grassroots channel on VOTV. From here it is picked up by the US indymedy newsreel program and screened in 20 cities in the US and out to 1 million people vier FSTV satellite broadcasting. She gets e-mails from 20 people who are involved in similar campaigns or who are inspired by the film to act locally. A local group of tree protesters in Oragan show the film in there protest camp vier a solar powered projector and make a film themselves about there campaign – this is then shown on VOTV and screened to the campaigners back in the bar in Oxford. 

User Jake

Jake sees an advert for the bushcraft show in a magazine – he checks out the URL and likes the videos so installs the VOTV player app. He finds some of the more political videos challenging/boring so removes there RSS feeds but likes the nature documenters and the eco consumerism – he uses the open MIRO channel guide to get films on women in beckenys and fast cars. The VOTV CMS gently points him towards more radical solutions to his interests, he finds a group who are protesting agenst the selling off of the local school football fields and gets involved in that campaign – at a meeting he gets chatting to a shiy local primary school teacher and they start dating and get marred. There kids watch VOTV and the family never gets a old corporate broadcast box.

User Jezebel

Is a anthropology student at brooks and is board of student life, she is looking for a date – she hers VOTV social network is the place to find some action, she gos to the website and creates an account – adding a good profile of her interests – this brings up a list of local groups/campaigns and individuals – she starts to message the sexy looking guys from there profiles – she spends a week at the Climate Camp shagging with a deadlocked eco worrer only coming out of her tent to eat vegan food and trough some half empty special brew cans at security late at night. She gos onto be a lawyer at bindmons solicitors after graduating with a first class degree.

Please add some more “use cases” this is the best way to guide programmers to create the CMS that we what rather than telling them exactly what to do at each stage. 

Published Date 11/1/12 1:45 AM

DRAFT

The old-mainstream media used to dominate national, international and local news to such an extent that many voices were unheard and any radical story was systemically distorted.

With the onward march of the digitisation project (see more info LINK) the old-mainstream media is crumbling with the failer of its business model and the lack of any large scale replacement model waiting in the wings. This leaves a space which really needs to be filled.

Why radical media matters, this is a question that has been answered then forgotten repeatedly over the last 20 years.

Undercurrents grew out of a frustration with the limitations of mainstream media and made alternative media accessible to a wide ordnance. By nurturing grass-roots voices and empowering them to tell there “unreported” storeys using the powerful medium of video.

Indymedia grew out of the possibility of technology and created the ability for unmediated malty-media communication through a centralised collective process. That spread the idea of first hand reporting by normal people widely around the world.

Then many failed projects provided top-down solutions to this same problem of how to amplify the voices of the unheard. The is a wide and spreading NGO grave yard of failed “media projects”.

The current meteoritic growth of social networks and there maturing into personal life-streaming has provided a corporate controlled client server centralised solution to the same problem. But the issue of control and ownership is largely hidden from the view of million’s of users. No such project as they are attempting has yet seceded on the open internet and if they were to succeed they would likely have to break the “key open bit” of the internet.

Lets briefly look at what happens next:

More and more “news” becomes personal and falls into the hands of a few dotcom “social media” companies. 

The old media/which used to dominate that survives the “digitisation transition” is increasingly filled with easy and profitable corporate PR rather than the old idea of journalism which it claimed to champion.

The radical alternative is playing very little role currently, this has to change.

What is the problem/solutions?

Good media is hard to make

Distribution networks need to be built and most importantly sustained – media is a flow not isolated individual items, this is (surprisingly) not understood well in the social media age.

Whona-abeys will always take up the openings in media spaces – and there agenda isn’t radical though they will try and wear radical cloths. Its important to not let them set/keep the agenda.

The left/progressive has a strong tendency to be divisive and uncooperative – its important to build this into any project that can be sustained. It always about a diversity of voices not one unified central voice.

Currently the is a “digital hole” in the sustainability this leads to the problem of sustaining media spaces outside the personal or volunteer space. The fading hope of advertising saving the paid media space is unlikely to come true. At its best, Social media sees through Advertising thus rendering it much less affective if it is used to hide/obscure unpleasant truths and to make transparent the empty creation of needs and foles promises that it is based on. It is looking like Advertising is not going to plug the gap in “digital hole”. 

This is what we need to do:

So we have to make something that is hard – easy

we have to build a diversity of sustainable media networks not many failed single sultutions.

we have to keep them open even when the will be strong voices for the one true way, the one authoritative voice dressed as consensus process.

we have to replace advertising as the financial model of in-depth journalism.

And standing in our way actually is very little, the old-mainstream is currently in a rout, the new/whonabeys have little real attractive to offer. And the openness and the tools we need are already close at hand. What are you waiting for “just do it” is the conclusion of how activist organise get to it (:

How do we work LINK to just do it

Published Date 10/17/12 3:50 AM

In relation to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Social_Forum

DRAFT – this is a e-mail dialogue that illustrates the issues of horizontal and vertical process and how they fail to balance.

Firstly the has been a lot of talk of me as some kind of egotistical anarchist… this is far from the truth, and by long experiences if anyone asks I call my self a socialist in anarchist circals. Maybe its time that we have a go-round of the e-mail list and introduce ourselves..

So a bit about me:

* was key to setting up the video side of the media centre in Genoa – 73 Italian riot police are facing prosecution and jail through my video work at the Diaz school raid have already testified to the prosecutors and have to go back for the court case in a few months. My video has helped to keep quite a few people out of jail.

* work full-time at undercurrents probably the most successfully alternative media organisation, prior to the IMC. Our work reached out to millions of people and helped to shape the globalisation movement that created the WSF. We tell stories that you don’t see on TV. You can watch one of our films here: http://showcase.commedia.org.uk/article/articleview/331/1/23/

* helped to found the European Newsreal which is a half hour alt-news program that is regularly translated into 5 languages to be screened around Europe and broadcast to up to 11 million people on US satellite TV

* travel extensively, organising screenings, grassroots alt-media training workshops and setting up media centres at major events.

* recently have been have been involved in the creation of Oxford IMC and the idea of local news. www.oxford.indymedia.org.uk

I see the ESF as a place to showcase alternatives by film and debate.

The horizontal globalisation movement has been going for a long time and its good that it now encompasses the SWP/GR who joined rather more recently ( and then some how, ludicrously, claimed to have invented it!) I in no way want to exclude the old left and would welcome the SWP/GR and GLA into the process – however they have to engage in the process and respect its diversity, rather than dominate and obscure it.

Hamish Campbell

UPDATE: later in the process

To try and clear up some of the purposeful misunderstandings:

I feel it is very important for the SWP/GR to be involved in the ESF process, though there very childish behaver – all this constant talk of the need to be grown up and serious makes them had to take seriously. They do have knowledge of creating (though they have a terminal problem of sustaining) large structures. They do know the language of trade unions and bureaucratic hierarchy and the will be many of them to deal with.

The problem lies in that:

* they are dominating, disrupting, dictatorial, and damming of any hope of open/democratic process which is key to the new politics that is at the core of the ESF.

* they and the people around them don’t trust democracies… and the ESF process doesn’t seam to be able to create this trust that’s us…

* the working group structure started out very well – but it cant be controlled by them thus cannot be allowed to continue… dose anyone get any idea of insecurity here… how can we bring the power back to the working groups which are working well.

* we as the ESF need to sanction them and then get on with the practicality of the London ESF gathering.

Can the ESF, that’s all of us, get back on a level with our collective hope and dreams… the SWP/GR are universally hated by a large majority of the alternative globalisation movement if they are seen to be at the centre of the ESF it WILL BE SERUASLY WEAKEND. Can they not be quite so blatant in there manipulations… and let some other voices into the monotony that is the current “dialogue”.

I for one wont the SWP/GR and the mare of London involved in the ESF process if another world is possible we have to start with the one that is here and now and that dose include them.

Hamish Campbell

UPDATE: the end of the process

Hi ESF organisers,

What should we do at the European meeting on the 6-7^th? The 2004 UK European Social Forum will probably go ahead in a bastardised stunted form unless some fresh air and creative energy can be brought into the process. The current “Organising Committee” was concocted in secret, forced through a meeting by acclamation and is clearly/practically designed to exclude thoughts who aren’t mates of the GLA and SWP/Globalise Resistance. This small minority have by there dogmatic/manipulative view of alt-politics made the 2004 UK ESF process in to a farce.

It’s hard to know what can be done at the European ESF meeting, as these people have long experiences of packing meetings, manipulating chairs, imposing agendas and telling lies through nit-picking truth. With no dialogue between the different groups this meeting cannot achieve anything.

* Can the organising process be opened or is this a lost minority course? Perhaps the positive way forward here is to get good facilitation for the European meeting. Is it at all possible to make this happen?

* The question must be asked and answered – are the these lying/cheating/stealing comrades even part of the movement which we are all loosely part of?

Is the ESF process a space for people who – lie, cheat and steal?

* Lieing – they keep calling for openness were everything they create is closed.

* Cheating – the chars they continually install have no mandate for consensus all key decisions are decided before the meetings begin.

* Steeling they couldn’t get a consensus on there “organising committee” structure, and refused to listen to the many alternatives, so imposed one by packing a meeting and passing their motion by “acclamation” when it is explicitly stated in the WSF principals that decisions CAN NOT BE MADE BY ACLAMATION for this very reason of groups stealing the process.

This small anti-democratic clique have pushed through there agenda ending the stale mate they created in the first place so as to close the process down to them and there mates. It will now be very difficult to work with them to open up the ESF process as if they do they risk loosing all credibility. Realise this and having long experiences of lieing/cheating/stealing they have castrated the ESF to keep their domination as they cannot quietly dominate it. I feel that if the process can be opened in even small ways they themselves and there authoritarian tactics will be gradually sidelined… they will be, in true ESF spirit, one voice amongst many.

“What is to be done”

Hamish Campbell

ESF practicalities/culture/media working groups

www.undercurrents.org

www.oxford.indymedia.org.uk

Published Date 10/17/12 2:35 AM

F***K off and do it your self

This is a humorous response page to many quires we get.

This project is radically decentralized so you will be continuously disappointed and dis-empowered if you keep asking permission before you do things. LINK

And if you continuously need the “centre” to mediate communication between you and other members of the project then you will achieve very little and leave disappointed. As the “centre” will not do this beyond the first contact and occasional chase-up.

Its up to YOU to fallow things threw, we fallow the philosophy of “fail, then fail better” as a creative strategy, so the only way to keep involved is to embrace this.

So “just do it” to quote the famous capitalist enterprise (;

Published Date 10/17/12 2:12 AM

It started as a mashup…

INTRO

We have everything in place currently to run the channel and scale it up to 100K’s viewers and when the funding comes through we can pay to expand the infustructer to make the channel independent from copurte structures and scalable to much wider ardencies.

Building VisionOnTV

Here is a list of the resources we use to build VisionOnTV – its important to note that in our use of courpute infrustter we have a back up that can be brought into place to replace any part of the system – the advantage of copuret solutions is that they mean we can get on with building the thing we are good at rather than become bogged down in the technical backend infrastructure. But this independent infustructer is in place in the long term as we need it.

The key choice that is needed when the funding comes through is our CMS which will run the web front end of the project and the social networking for the content and channels.

VisionOnTV (FREE GPL) player app – a customised version of the open source MIRO media player projected 7 million downloads this year. We are paying a very talented programmer to work on this important open source project.

Feeburner (FREE COPUERATE) gives us very reliable RSS feeds with good user stats so we can know who and how people are watching our content. Feebuner takes the strain off our independent infrastructure so that we can expand rapidly with out worrying about scalability. We use a PRO feature to retain ownership of the URL of our feeds if we need to leave Goggle for what ever resion.

Feeddigester (PAY SMALL BUSSNES) allows us to publish on multiple hosting options and have it all come out seamlessly on one RSS feed. It empowers us to mix and match hosting from free streaming sights such as Blip to torrent sights such as VUZE, Broadcast Mashion and our owen CMS and torrent hosting ???? Feeddigest also gives us very esey to use and flexible imbed codes to create RSS widgets on partner websites and in our own CMS. Our owen CMS can replace feeddigester if needbe.

XBTITEAM (GPL and low cost PAYED HOSTING) torrent server alwes us to be independent from copurate hosting solutions and allowing full length HD quality downloads to millions of people vier our VisionOnTV player application. This gives us independence. We have a friendly cheap installing/support and hosting option for this for the people who write the software. P2P torrent streaming is coming on-stream which should allow us to move off free corporate streaming servers if/when we need to.

Broadcast Masion (FREE GPL) was our orional CMS which handealed torrents and direct downloads – we are retiring this and moving onto a new CMS as support has been discontinued for BM.

New CMS (GPL, hosted on own servers) – we cant make the desion on which CMS to go with till we have funding to pay the developer currently we have a choes of two CMS Druple or Life Ray both fully furfill our needs and have advantages. We have 2 seprut experienced developers ready to build us a druple web sight, still haven’t found a developer for Liferay yet. It will take 4-6 weeks to build the new front end/backend CMS

Greennet (PAY) currently we host our HTML web frount end on our greennet server we still have quite a bit of copaserty before we need to upgrade this

BlipTV (FREE) is our current streaming and direct dowenload host. We post to blip vier tubemogal with a channel tag, we then take a custom RSS feed of this tag from blip into feedigest which mashes it with the other RSS feeds from the channel posting hosts and passes it to feeburner were it is turned into a standard compliant media RSS feed with inclushers for the VisionOnTV app and other RSS podcatchers/feedreaders.

Greennet (PROBONO) we have a pro-bonoa PRO account (normally $500 a month) on Tubemogal which allows us to simultaneously upload to the 12 top free video hosting sights and track downloads and usage on each sight. This gives us huge distribution around the web with a single easy upload.

Vuez (FREE) easy to use torrent hosting we can use for user uploading and hosting, aspesherly useful for longer films and by technically inexperienced video producers.

Godday (PAY) alwes us to cheaply and easily setup domain forwards to all our channel pages so that you can access them all by a simple and memorable URL. Godday is a bit of a weakness and when funding comes through and the channel starts to grow we will move the domains to a more “political” reliable hosting company. But for know they give very easy access to all the feature we need to make thing work in a fast and flexible way.

Blix (THEY PAY US) we have a contract with Blix which is the largest video search engine in the world who will host and re-distribute all our videos to 12 major corporate search engines and add advertising on these search results which we get a 50/50 split of the revenue on these coupure sights. This will bring in revue for us and distribute the films much wider and as each film will have a link back to VisionOnTV. It outreachs to bring viewers to the better experience provided on by our own player app and streaming sight.

Youtube (THEY PAY US) we have a producer contract with youtube that means we get a share of the advertising revenue generated on there sight and on youtube embeds of our videos. We have over 700,000 video streams on youtube over the last year and XXXX subscribers. The advertismsts from Blix and youtube only appear on sight outside the VisionOnTV project – they will never appear on our pages or in our player app.

Shows (FREE) We have sponsorship in place already to cover the cost of some of our more outreach shows. AZ-of bushcraft and On the push, with a film deal in place for our show living in the future. Sustainability is falling into place for content producers, what they need from us is the widest distribution.

Bookmaking

Publicity

Stumbalapon

Delisuse

Some thoughts on project infrastructure.

We aim to give radical filmmaker the wides distribution possible of there content. The films we publish are distributed to over 30 web locations and are hosted on 10-15 different hosting partners to give both maximum distribution and inshore reliable hosting and robustness agenst censorship of our more radical ant-corporate content.

Redundancy of publishing Because of the way the RSS feeds are setup we can mix and match our publishing to any hosting source as needed in the case of censorship or losing a hosting source. We currently host our project blogs on blogspot.com and have backup RSS publishing pages there that are mashed into our channel RSS feeds as a backup if for any reason the are problems posting other ways – we aim to have at least 4 ways to publish to Visionontv. Our CMS, blip tag (vier tubemogal or direct), blogspot and our own torrent tracker.

Cloud computing or our own servers?

During the setup phase we have been using our own existing server at greennet and this should be scaleable up to a few hundred thousand viewers after this we need to think about switching to Amazon cloud hosting and storage using VM’s – the are pros and cons of this approach. As it will be built with VM it will be relatively simple to move out of the cloud into our own hosting if necessary for “political” resion and the use of torrents for media storage means that this is feasible which still reaching out to a huge ordeance. Our prooferd option is to build the project in the cloud and then deal with the possible issues as they come up – this will allow effortless scalability while having a safe fallback encase of censorship or corporate presser.

We are building the project so that it can scale and adapt fast and its is secure and independent.

Published Date 10/17/12 1:47 AM

The is a whole load of fake citizen journalism thought going on in this debate http://bit.ly/J0i5l Basically “professionals” here see citizen journalism as a way of getting raw material so that they can do “real” journalism on the cheap. But the role of the paid professional journalist is almost eliminated in the digital world as the institutions that support them are bankrupt. In the digital world people do media because they won’t to, not because they are paid to, paid too in the digital world is a hard sell and getting harder. It’s the nature of digital process, not a moral or social choice, people make this mistake – technology shapes our society – so make the most of it. Your old jobs you aspire to are finished, fading fast. If you won’t to be a journalist you need to re-create the profession which isn’t the same as defending the old profession.

Get to it http://visionon.tv

UPDATE: traditional media is learning to becoming the contemporary media and shaping the new in the image of the past…

Published Date 10/17/12 1:13 AM

Our project is basically about technological standards – It isn’t about what people do with these standards – the standards them selves lean in the direction we politically desire inherently.

And these technological standards will not be brought about by technology, but the social use of technology, so we are creating a community of people around these standards – and it is this community that will create the technological standard. The technology by it self is powerless and will wither with out being embraced by an active and affective community.

So to repeat it is a technological project, which can only come out of a community project. If we treat it as only one of these (as people commonly do, then neither will work).

Published Date 10/7/12 6:28 PM

Reflections on looking around the room at the 2012 NUJ DM conference – The union is by far the most democratic I have found, but this democracy is embedded in a deeply ingrained bureaucratic tradition. The is the establishment who have to keep the day to day of the union, there largely invisible agenda is hidden by the need to keep the whole thing running. Then the are a group pushing an agenda that is clearly rejected by the majority of the union that takes up a lot of time, they then feel victimised and build conspiracy around what seams to be mostly inefficiency. If they were building “transparency” I would support them much more actively if they were constructing… The problem is that they criticizes and add bureaucracy to a already over bureaucratic union.

The outcome of all this is much smoke and noise with little accountability, so as a newcomer you are put in the uncomfortable position of largely supporting the powers that be. And the root needs for change and renewal are lost from the conversation and decisions of the union. 

Published Date 10/6/12 12:13 AM

Some feeling about my personal experience of old school democratic trade unionism.

Friday Night

Had an interesting, disquieting conversation tonight at a social event after the work of the NUJ delegate meeting. I had been visiting the delegate meeting room every so often to dip in to try and engage with the process, and each time I had failed, due to bad sound, complex and obscure timing, and the opaque and ritualistic language used. Being me I looked around for a space were I could help out and found the students making media about the event – joined in there and worked with different students to make and distribute 6 video reports that day.

Back to the conversation in the bar, the overly serious youthfull man I was talking to, seemed surprised and a bit disapproving of my action. His convincing argument was that I had been mandated and “paid” to participate in the DM process, travel, accommodation and food being covered by the union. Its a strange feeling for a horizontal like me am I obliged to do work through this process?

Am more interested if the traditional union is flexible enough to work with a diversity of strategy as the current one is simply inappropriate for many people’s view of a contemporary union. As I see it my “work” at the DM is to see if I can work in this space and perhaps more importantly can this space work with me and people like me. The old problematic divide between the horizontal and the virticalist, think, the NUJ might be one of the few union’s that has wiggle space, we will see.

Saturday

I’try again to engage with what am now appreciating is “power politics” the ritualistic fight for notice, resources and power. After a nights sleep, understanding, of my own aversion, and the democratic nature of this anti-consensuses process. Today it is the funding debate, get up early to be there on time, lets try and make it work as good to respect the attempt.

Going better, helps to talk to my fellow delegate sitting next to me. Much of the noise has the flavourer of sectarian infighting. By asking members you CAN find your way around the process. But its a Q. of motivation to engage and stay engaged. Is this the best we can do as the left?