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.

————————————————————————-

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.

We’ve started to see more downloads on weekend days than weekdays. Does this mean people are using Democracy in their spare time, rather than surfing around at work?

What are the highs and lows of the past year for the Participatory Culture Foundation?

Wilson: Bringing together the functionality of a web browser, video player, and RSS/bittorrent downloader was much trickier on Windows than on Mac and Linux. That was a protracted low. It was like there was a series of hills in front of us, but until we got over the first hill we couldn’t see the next, and right up until the end we never knew how many challenges remained. It was extremely frustrating. But in software development, when you’re doing something somebody hasn’t done before, that risk is always there.

The week in February when we launched the Windows version of Democracy Player was definitely a high. We had a tremendous response with 100,000 downloads in the first week, and with each release we get more positive feedback and more regular users. It’s also very cool, interesting, and satisfying for us to watch all the amazing videos that people are using Democracy Player to distribute.

What features of Democracy are community inspired? What things have you implemented at the community’s request?

Reville: Tons of things have come from users. It tends to be a lot of little things that help people really get into the flow. For example: marking videos as unwatched, setting torrent ports, a setting to play one video then stop (rather than playing continuously), and lots more.

On your website it says that you work with lots of volunteers worldwide. How many people do you work with? What do they do? How do you bring them into the workflow?

Wilson: We’ve had hundreds of volunteers. How they fit in depends on what they’re doing. There are volunteers who test new versions of Democracy before each release. We email them when there’s a new build for testing, and they report bugs in the bug tracker (Trac). We also have volunteers who translate Democracy into other languages. For that we use Rosetta, the translation tool used by Ubuntu (a linux distribution) which makes it easy for volunteers to collaborate on translating text.

Volunteer software developers use the same tools and email lists that paid developers use. And volunteers who work closely with us on stuff other than code (say, a volunteer moderator, or a graphic designer) coordinate with us using Basecamp, which is what we’re using internally anyway. If you’re already using good online collaboration tools internally (and you should, no matter what you’re doing!) that makes it easier to involve volunteers.

When did you first come up with the concept for Democracy? How has the landscape changed since then? Do you think it’s better or worse for a participatory culture?

Wilson: We conceived the project in late 2004 and started designing and building in spring 2005. Since then, online video has exploded, and the center of that explosion is of course YouTube. Things are vastly better now for the cause of mass participation in culture because we see it all around us. One of the web developers at PCF, and an old friend, made a video where his band dances on treadmills to one of their songs. Three million Youtube views later, MTV asked them to perform the same stunt live on the Video Music Awards. This is incredible.

On the other hand, the structure that’s emerged in the online video space is very problematic. Much of the online video explosion has been centered around large monolithic services, two of which are now owned by Google. This has serious implications for competition, free speech, and the overall vibrancy of the medium.

Nick mentioned in an interview for Technology Evangelist that Democracy has taken twice as long as expected. Was it difficult to keep volunteers and the community motivated when it became clear the project would take longer?

Wilson: When there’s a delay like there was with the Windows version, you always lose some momentum. But it’s difficult to measure, and my hunch is it wasn’t too big a problem.

Why is this battle so important to you? Why TV?

Wilson: Well, TV is in many ways the dominant medium, but it’s dominated by a small number of companies and has been the least open to public participation, so the range of cultural and political expression is horribly narrow. Since democracies require an informed and engaged public to function properly, it’s really dangerous for the dominant mass medium to be so restrictive. We think bringing the diversity, vitality, and openness of the internet into the video mass medium is the best way to address this very serious problem.

What’s your relationship to YouTube? Is it cutting into the market? Or is it a realized dream?

Reville: From a software point of view, YouTube is another way that people can host content and we let people search and download from YouTube. From a social standpoint, YouTube is a little scary. If online video becomes monopolized by one or two large companies, we’ll be seeing the same kind of power consolidation that we see in traditional broadcast television. We’re working on an open model where viewers can connect to multiple video hosts at once.

When do you predict most people will watch TV over the Internet? When will a tool like Democracy become commonplace?

Wilson: In certain chunks of the population (young people with broadband, for example) it’s happening already. I think it hits the “most people” mark when there’s some show that each one of those people really wants to see that’s only available online.

You started working on Democracy quite some time ago. Since then, how has the TV-Internet landscape changed? Have recent developments changed Democracy?

Wilson: We’ve added support for Flash video and most of the popular video sharing sites so that people can use sites like Youtube to host their videos without encountering any problems. And we’ve made it easy to search these sites and create feeds based on certain search terms.

On your website you explain the significance of making Democracy open-source and built to open-standards, writing “This matters because it keeps video flowing freely. When you lock people in to closed, proprietary services, you lose everything that makes the internet work.” What is the trend today? Do you think that Democracy will be one of a few open-source platforms for exchanging video?

Wilson: There definitely is a trend towards the video space concentrating around a few large services, and these services are almost all based on a proprietary player and format, Flash. I do think Democracy will be a rallying point for people doing video who don’t want their organizations or their companies to be dependent on proprietary software or on a web service that at any moment could change in ways that harm their interests.

Our focus at NewAssignment.net is on distributed journalism. What have you learned at Democracy that would be useful to our project? How can an effort like Democracy aid decentralized, distributed, independent media efforts?

Wilson: Well, there are some direct technical benefits Democracy could bring to such a project. For example: the ability to distribute and create communities around the distribution of broadcast-quality video. If you want a community exchanging and filtering video that eventually needs to be shown on TV, Youtube won’t cut it.