Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson are two of the founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF). The nonprofit organization is dedicated to building a set of free and open tools that will let online video grow in a decentralized, open access direction. PCF is based in Worcester, MA.

Amanda Michel caught up with Nicholas and Holmes to discuss Democracy, PCF’s open source video player and their role in our Internet TV culture.

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Would you quickly describe Democracy?

Wilson: Democracy is a free, open source video player and downloader with a simple interface. It plays virtually any video, you can explore and download video podcasts and bittorrent feeds, and you can search for and save videos from sites like YouTube. It’s also a vision for Internet video distribution that embodies all the best principles of the Internet: openness, competition, and freedom from centralized control. Anyone can use Democracy Player to distribute video directly to their audience without being dependent on Youtube/Google.

Who uses Democracy? What do you know about your users and community?

Reville: It’s a really hard question to investigate, actually. We know that the content that’s being submitted to our Channel Guide really runs the gamut. Since we’re a video app, I expect our user base is broad, but probably leaning towards early tech adopters, blogosphere, etc.

Robin Sloan is the Online Studio Futurist at Current TV, the network created by, with and for its audience. Although his position sounds made up, Sloan is responsible for plotting new products on Current’s different platforms. Before Current he worked at the Poynter Institute, where he spent two years “wishing something like Current existed.”

Amanda Michel caught up with Sloan to find out how the young station stays fresh with viewer created content and how the increase in popularity of online video has affected Current.
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How many people work at Current and how many regular contributors do you have? What about total contributors?

We have a little under 300 people in three offices: San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York.

We haven’t made total contributor numbers public yet, but the statistic I find most interesting is a subset of that: the number of repeat video uploaders.

Remember, when we ask for viewer created content (VC2 — I will use that acronym a lot in this interview), we’re essentially asking for mini-documentaries, often quite polished. So if somebody is uploading more than one, that translates into a lot of work and a lot of investment in what we’re doing.

Our corps of repeat video uploaders is about 500 strong — not bad when you consider that while YouTube gets videos of cats jumping, we get this. (Warning: saddest video ever.)

Who are Current’s producers; People who worked in media professionally or citizen media members with all the right skills?

* When NewAssignment.Net first came across Voter Story we had some questions about the organizations involved and where the information went. As the site has been updated most of the important questions have been answered. You can now find their privacy policy and other relevant information. VoterStory is an innovative idea and considering the project was built in two weeks, it’s understandable that some kinks needed to be worked out. *

Some questions began to surface yesterday after we VoterStory.org Web Adlinked to VoterStory.org, a distributed voter protection effort led by EvolveStrategies and funded by Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute.

VoterStory.org offers concerned citizens a widget to post in their Web sites and blogs that instantly relays questionable incidents at the polls to voter protection organizations.

If you want to know which organizations and blogs support VoterStory.org, it’s easy to find out. VoterStory.org posts the names of organizations and blogs currently hosting their widget on its ‘about’ page.

Regina Lynn: ”I could not possibly stay on top of it all if it were just me.”The beat of Wired News columnist Regina Lynn is unique in several ways – not only is she using a smart mob to do her reporting, but it’s one she is also part of. And Lynn is carving out new ground in use of the Web to cover her beat.

At her own site, reginalynn.com, Lynn hosts the Sex Drive Forum, where several thousand people talk about everything from favorite sex toys to bondage and responsible STD tests while awaiting Lynn’s queries. She opened the forum more than two years ago to provide people with a safe place to discuss sex and technology. Nowadays she credits her “smart mob” with helping her stay informed and up-to-date. “It’s a vast subject, and I could not possibly stay on top of it all if it were just me.”

I interviewed Lynn about how her forum keeps her on the beat. The Q&A is below. If you have other questions you’d like to ask of Regina, send her an email. If you know of other journalists whom we should interview, let me know.

In April 2004 Zack Exley, my boss and John Kerry’s Director of Online Organizing, tasked me with my first sizeable project. “Figure out a good way to organize supporters nationwide who want to interact with the media. You know, letters to the editor, calls in to radio programs, blogs, etc.. Make sure you can quantitatively measure the project’s success day to day.”

The assignment couldn’t have been a better match. Zack knew I was intensely interested in new media developments and that, more than anything else, I liked the challenge of doing something for the first time. Before joining the Kerry campaign I worked on Howard Dean’s campaign as the National Director of Generation Dean, the campaign’s official youth outreach effort. I volunteered to the Dean campaign believing I would spend most of my time stuffing envelopes, mailing material, and doing research. Just weeks after I started, my boss Zephyr recruited me to organize students for Dean. When she became a member of Dean’s fledgling Internet team a month later, it was as if I did too.

Recently the Sunlight Foundation asked members of the public to help uncover which members of Congress employed spouses on their campaign committees. Just two days later, Sunlight’s Bill Allison reported that this “distributed research project” was done:

Incredible!—in less than two days, a virtual investigative team dug through campaign finance records for 435 current members of Congress, trying to find out if they paid their spouses from campaign funds. There were 24 of us (myself included—I looked up six members) who left our names, and 83 members investigated by anonymous researchers… Of those who did leave their names, our huge thanks go out to KCinDC who investigated 155 House members, Beezling who looked into 116, VaAntirepublican who did 24.

What’s really interesting to me is not how quickly this assignment was completed, but the fact that just a few people completed more than 70 percent of the work.