Open Content and Public Broadcasting
Are there kinds of programming that you think are better or worse suited to an Open Content format?
Most will not create stuff that’s anywhere near the quality of what you do… But they’re going to do things that make them more media literate… and they will create things that we don’t expect. And to me, the ceding of control to others for the uses that we don’t anticipate are where we get the really interesting stuff.
(Dan Gillmor, Center for Citizen Media)
For us as content producers, what are the risks and opportunities that Open Content offers? Will people refuse to be filmed if they know their interviews can be downloaded and re-edited freely by anyone accessing the Web? On the other hand, if we don’t offer our programs in Open Content service, are we “hoarding” valuable public resources? What kinds of new genres and formats can we develop using Open Content, for children, for education, for general audiences?
2 COMMENTS, oldest at top.
I believe that open content offers local producers a path to extend civic engagement. We are embarking on an experimental initiative to bring other voices to the production process by providing selected video clips and photographs online. If I could figure out how to add an attachment, I’d attach the proposal. But in essence, we want to have our community share their personal stories relating to the history of Miami. We hope to jumpstart the effort by providing video clips and still images. Two local visual archives are joining us in this effort. We are going to encourage users to mix these resources with their own visuals and audio track to create their story to upload to our companion web site.
Posted by Jack Kelly on Wednesday February 7, 2007 · #
Hoarding may not be the most apt term, but keeping materials in closed formats and under closed licenses does prevent updates, improvements, and further distribution. It also makes direct review, comparison, and translation difficult.
New genres and formats that Open Content makes possible include locally-relevant texts, local context for global materials, and local and regional aspects of universal stories which would be prohibitively complicated or expensive to produce in a central fashion.
Additionally, works of great breadth or detail that can only be produced or processed through a collaboration of hundreds or thousands of people scale best when there are no issues of copyright or licensing to negotiate before modifications are made.
Posted by SJ Klein, One Laptop per Child on Wednesday February 7, 2007 · #
Funding for this conference was provided by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
