Western Mass Drupal Camp will be held in Amherst MA on 1/21/12

I was very happy to find out this weekend that I will be speaking next weekend (1/21/12) at Western Mass Drupal Camp in Amherst.

I’ll be walking through a case study of the site ISITE Design recently designed and built for the JFK Jr Forum at the Harvard Institute of Politics (The Forum site is new, the Institute of Politics site is existing).

As I wrote in the session description:

An interesting project – in some ways a very simple Drupal site with a single content type, but lots of interesting features.

Key features we’ll review include:

• Kaltura – open source (and SaaS) video platform for livestreaming, transcoding, and delivery, including HTML 5 video
• Programmatic content migration from EZ Publish, using Feeds
• Homepage feature carousel and “featured” forums: Views, Blocks, Nodequeue
• Complex Views (Headers, Contextual Arguments, rewriting)
• Taxonomy: Speakers, Moderators, Cosponsors, Subjects
• Calendar of Forums

Looks like it will be a very full day of sessions, including presentations on responsive design, Drush basics, Views, and usability testing.

McIntyre Medical Building (Photo by un flaneur, cc-by-nc-nd license)

DrupalCamp Montreal was this past weekend, and the videos are already posted! The event venue was McGill University’s McIntyre Science Center, which is equipped with an automated system to capture lectures at specific times.

The system captures the video output being projected as well as video of the lectern where the speaker is standing, and makes the files available on a predetermined url. (I found that the “webcast” view with slides and speaker both visible sometimes failed in Firefox but worked in Chrome – unfortunately it’s silverlight based).

Definitely Worth watching:

• Jen Simmons on HTML 5: webcast | mp4
• Angie Byron (Webchick) on Getting involved in Drupal: webcast | mp4
• Educational Roundtable: webcast | mp4

My own video is embedded below, or you can see the webcast version (includes slides in one window and me talking in another – may not work in some browsers) or download the mp4.

Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for a great camp!

Just found out I will be speaking at DrupalCamp Montreal in a few weeks, on the subject of Open Source Video, using Kaltura with Drupal.

We’re doing some work with an institute at a local university involving migration of a large video archive and design of a video microsite, so the research for the presentation will line up nicely with the ongoing effort.

Look forward to seeing Montreal – I haven’t been in years – and also hope to run a BoF for Drupal in higher education.

Already planning some restaurant visits on Vegan Montreal. (It’s very strange to my anglophone ears that “végétalien” means vegan in French, but “végétarien” means vegetarian – what trouble that must be for native Japanese speaking vegans trying to visit Montreal, given this).

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (“You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode – planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions – click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms – an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above – free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.