On Dec 27, 2007 10:47 AM, Andrew Fife <afife@untangle.com> wrote:

Hi BALUG volunteers:

Chrisitan Einfeldt is curious to know whether or not he can film BALUG's January meeting. I see no problem with this, but I do know that SVLUG had a bit of an uproar when some of their sessions were recorded by Google and posted on Youtube w/o a free licenses.

Everything that the DTP cameras shoot will be released under a cc by-SA license and posted to the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection (IA DTP VC). We already have 56 hours of such video in raw form posted here:

http://www.archive.org/details.php?identifier=digitaltippingpoint

That footage is raw footage, and will need to be re-rendered before it is used in any final project.

Our keyword search index page is located below. It is the place to go to find specific persons or themes for our footage. The Internet Archive is currently changing its search software, and so the index might not be operational again until January 3, 2008, although we have had occasion full service restored intermittently. The index is operational today. Here is the index page nonetheless:

http://tinyurl .com/yluwoc

I would want to ensure that the BALUG community had access to the film. For me, posting to Youtube (or preferably another higher quality site) would be good enough, but having witnessed the SVLUG spat, it might be better to request the film be licensed under the creative commons or something like that.

I am a big fan of YouTube, but we nonetheless release all of our footage on the IA DTP VC under a cc by-SA license simulatenously with any YouTube release, for a couple of reasons: 1) the IA has a great index; 2) less concerns with licensing, as our cc by-SA license is plainly evident; 3) the IA DTP VC footage exists in both ogg theora and .mpg format, which means that it will be indexable and taggable by Annodex technology when that becomes widely available; 4) both of those formats are offered in relatively hi-res format, which makes it more useful for people who want to rip and mix it for Internet video; 5) it gives the community some sense of ownership of the video.

If we don't hear back from anyone on this issue, the default is going to be to let Christian film so long as he makes it accessible to BALUG in some way.

Please note that it might take a little while for the footage to be posted to the IA DTP VC, as we need to rough edit it first, and we have a long line of footage ahead of it. But if we could get some help from the community in rough editing the footage for our film, we would really appreciate it. Please do recall that this is *your* footage, meaning that it will all be available for free (as in freedom) and free (as in beer). We are hoping that the community will take ownership of it, which means chipping in to help get the word out there to the world. We are doing all of our editing on FOSS tools, and so we hope that this DTP film will be the world's first film about FOSS using all FOSS tools and finished in a collaborative FOSS fashion. One of our community members has even written a nice BASH tool chain to take some of the drudgery out of doing the work:

http://digitaltippingpoint.com/wiki/index.php?title=From_Tape_to_Archive

The other thing to remember is that audio in that room will be really tough. The best solution to solving the problem is to use a wireless lav mic that we can hand around. Lighting will also be tough, and so if people want to bring lights, that would be great. Painters' lights work really well, although since that room is so huge, we will need several people to bring such lights. The DTP project truly is an open source project in every sense of the phrase. The story is our story; it literally is going to be a movie about us -- the people in our community. Of course, we have also traveled to 6 nations and 3 continents getting footage on historical figures such as the Mayor of Munich and the Culture MInister of Brazil and an IT adviser to now UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A rough proof of concept video is here to demonstrate that we have interviewed all of the above, as well as Jack Messman, the former CEO of Novell:

http://www.archive.org/details/proof_of_concept_four_mins.mpg

The goal of our film is to link up all these far-flung individuals to show how we are working together across language, geographic barriers, and language barriers to bring freedom to cyberspace around the world. Our local community will act as an example of the broader global movement.

Thanks either way for considering our request, folks!