In support of the CC Uploader for Drupal

The field of public access TV has been sharing content between stations for over 30 years. In that light, Creative Commons licensing is a natural fit for the movement. Here's an article as early as 2004 here (pg 34).

Beginning in 2003, initiatives have been launched that have sought to enable a "digital bicycling" of files between stations. Due to the size of the files needed for TV broadcast and the demands that such a network put on the skill set of the Access television community there has not yet been widespread adoption of tools for content sharing.

The CC Uploader tool for Drupal will change that. It is a mature solution designed for the open source platform that is widely considered the standard for public access TV stations, Drupal. Its project lead understands the needs of the field and has developed a tool that will amplify the work done through the Open Media Project.

In the larger sense a tool such will enable the larger collaborative push to create a new ecosystem of public media.

Supporters

Jason Daniels

Easton Community Access Television: Executive Director

On a hyperlocal - community to community level we could share sporting events, talk shows as we begin to create a public television network. Then scaling upwards to a state level or regionally or nationally this project has tremendous promise.

We already encourage the use of Creative Commons and we employ Drupal, we just need a mechanism to help push large files around and this is it.

Daniel Westergren

Open Channel Vaxjo, Sweden (and on the board of the National Association of Open Channels in Sweden, several open channels in Sweden would be interested in this as more and more move to Drupal because of these tools)

Brylie Oxley

I have wanted to facilitate the process of submitting community media to the Internet Archive for several years now. While iArchive has greatly improved the submission process, the CC Publisher is the most user friendly (drag-and-drop simple) solution that I have encountered. Integrating the CC Publisher design principles into a Drupal module would be an excellent community service! :-)

Darrick Servis

Davis Media Access: Director of Operations

We are a public access television station who would benefit greatly from this project. We have over 10,000 hours of locally produced programming dating back to 1985 and by using Drupal and the Open Media Project with the help of Kevin Reynen have started the process of digitizing all of this content. Having this uploader will allow our organization to add this content to archive.org without any added cost to our organization.

We already have a process for automating and digitizing our content and setting creative commons license wherever possible. The CC uploader would work seamlessly with this process in the background and require limited human intervention on our part. We look forward to having this capability.

Ray Tiley

Community Television Network: IT Manager

Community Television Network is a Public Access center serving the larger Southern Maine Area. Although we license our content under Creative Commons the CC Uploader would allow us the opportunity to leverage larger audiences for our content and greatly simplify the workflow for providing our content to those outside our viewing area.

Chad Fennell

This project could hold broad implications for video archival practice in academic libraries and related communities. I believe this is a valuable project worthy of support.

Nonso Christian Ugbode

Director of Digital Media, National Black Programming Consortium. As a step toward a vast library of truly open, community content, this is a great tool. NBPC recently launched the Public Media Corps project (http://publicmediacorps.org), a community media project that could use the uploader to harness community voices for wider audiences.

Jennifer Gilomen

Bay Area Video Coalition: Director of Public Media Strategies

BAVC strongly supports this project. We operate public access television and numerous community media programs in San Francisco, California. We have extensive collections of youth media, culturally relevant works preserved and archived for public use, and now, hundreds of hours of locally-produced content submitted for broadcast on public access television. In the past, we have manually uploaded numerous files to Archive.org, but doing so requires scarce staff time.

This year, we have met with the leadership of Archive.org and spoken to several community media partners with whom we hope to collaborate; all parties agree that a tool like this is necessary to support real development of a community media archive on Archive.org. Without it, our ability to contribute to a central repository is dramatically limited. Such a tool would serve a dual purpose: it would offer community media centers access to these valuable resources for file storage, archiving, and streaming. Many of these sites have drupal-based web sites or are developing them. At the Alliance for Community Media conference last week, an informal drupal gathering was held, and nearly 40 attendees stated that they were in some stage of development on a drupal-based web site. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and these stations represent thousands of small community media centers throughout the nation. Secondly, the tool would make accessible to the public thousands of hours of locally-relevant, discoverable media content issued under Creative Commons licenses. We believe the collection itself, with a tool to facilitate contributions of content from drupal, will grow exponentially and become an invaluable cultural archive and national resource.

Brian Hiatt

Open Media Foundation: Web Director

The ability to share content between stations in a standardized way that leverages creative commons is an absolute must, not only for public access stations but many other CTC's as well. There is a lot of energy in these communities to start sharing content presently, but the currently available tools are either too complex or not built with a sustainable vision.

I've worked personally with the developer of this project (Kevin Reynen) for over 2 years, and have the utmost confidence that he would be able to execute this proposal in an effective way that integrates the needs of the community while leveraging the appropriate resources already available in Drupal.

Kevin Jeske

Community Television of Knoxville: Director of Development CommunityProducers.com: Creator

Since 1977, Community Television of Knoxville has provided training and access to television production facilities for the exclusive non-commercial use of local residents, nonprofit organizations, community groups, and local government agencies in our community. Recently, we created a Drupal-based website to allow Community Producers from all over the country to showcase their video & audio projects.

CommunityProducers.com encourages community producers to add their projects to our growing collection for on-line viewing and an expanded cable TV audience that could include community access channels across the country. Because of the enormous cost considerations, we do not actually store the video files at our site. Instead, we must require community producers to first upload them to other third party video sharing sites like Archive.org, Vimeo, etc.

An improved method to facilitate sharing of locally produced community video programming would be the CC Uploader tool (Content Agent) for Drupal. It would finally allow community access stations with basic broadband connections and thousands of hours of video programming to share this content with the world by pushing it to Creative Commons friendly Content Distribution Networks like Archive.org, Vimeo and others.

Craig Sinclair

Amherst Community Media: Community Media Coordinator

Amherst Community Media has existed under various monikers since 1975, we consequently have a huge archive of material on sundry formats that we are looking to digitize and share. As such we are like thousands of Community Media Centers across the US and across the world.

Through our involvement in the Open Media Project we have started using Creative Commons licenses to promote wider sharing of our current and archive material, a move that makes sense to staff and members and which we can easily implement with the Open Media toolset and our Drupal website.

In order for other Community Media Centers to benefit from using Creative Commons and realize the potential of this rich resource of material there needs to be a mechanism in place to easily enable the uploading and categorization of content. Having worked with Kevin Reynen, this project’s lead developer, over the last two years I am confident that this project under his leadership will be the model that enables Community Media and Creative Commons to promote wider use of each other while facilitating the archiving of untold riches from US cultural history.

Jack Brighton

Illinois Public Media: New Media Director pbcoreresources.org: Developer/Editor

At Illinois Public Media, we create some forty hours of born-digital local content each week. We're also in the process of digitizing several thousands of hours of audio and video archives dating from the late 1920s, much of which reflects the history of public affairs, news, and culture through the 20th century. We intend to make all this content accessible for public interest and educational purposes, and we hope to preserve it and preserve access to it for the long-term future. This is why we believe the CC Uploader for Drupal project is so important, as a vital piece of the Drupal toolset which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous wherever people are working to make and share media in the public interest. The integration of Creative Commons licensing the Internet Archive is a natural match for those using Drupal as a media publishing platform.

Illinois Public Media is currently developing a Drupal profile intended to help solve certain common problems with media cataloging, metadata, publishing, licensing, and preservation. CC Uploader for Drupal would fill a major gap in our own project, and would fit nicely within the model we are developing. From conversations with many other media producers, archivists, and Drupal users, it's clear this would fill a growing need.