[Tagdb] Folksonomies for Collaborative Open Source Filmmaking

[Kent Bye]

Greetings everyone.

Thanks Nitin for setting this up. I'll start this thread to introduce 
myself and my project.


THE ECHO CHAMBER DOCUMENTARY
My name is Kent Bye and I'm a documentary filmmaker working on a project 
about the failures of the mainstream media -- And how I produce the film 
will hopefully provide innovative solutions for doing collaborative, 
investigative citizen journalism that can extract the collective 
intelligence from a diverse set of volunteers.

As a documentary filmmaker, I'm in the business of collecting a ton of 
interview and stock footage, and then editing together the narrative 
themes that emerge from the data.  Folksonomy provides some pretty 
powerful capabilities for documentaries -- especially large-scope, 
politically-charged films about the mainstream media.

Our film's hypothesis is that the broadcast television news media became 
an uncritical echo chamber to the countdown towards the war in Iraq for 
the 6 months after there was a political consensus within Congress in 
early October 2002.

We interviewed 45 journalists, professors, think tank scholars and other 
perspectives about the how the mainstream media covered the Executive 
Branch's PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

We're in the process of having volunteers transcribe the 40+ hours of 
footage so that we can open source the text of the interviews, split 
them up into sound bites, assign a unique URL to each sound bite, and 
then internally tag each sound bite with folksonomy metadata.

We also have 35+ hours of ABC, CBS and NBC footage from the five months 
leading up to the military intervention -- and we have the Lexis 
transcripts for all of this footage. I'd love to also be able to post 
these news scripts online to be tagged with folksonomy metadata as well 
-- assuming that there aren't any copyright issues.


FOLKSONOMY FOR EDITING
I'm interested in ideas for making the subjective context of these film 
sound bites more explicit to make it easier to edit strings of sound 
bites together.  I'd also like to associate pro-war and anti-war 
identities to the folksonomy metadata so that I can track the common 
ground and points of departure between the two group's subjective 
judgments.  This could bring about a deeper understanding between 
ideologically entrenched perspectives and provide some interesting 
conflict resolution cabilitites


COLLABORATIVE MEDIA
Apple's Final Cut Pro editing software has the capability to import XML 
created by third party software, which means that I can collect a number 
of metadata fields for sound bites from volunteers around the world 
through an open source CMS like Drupal. (i.e. what OurMedia.org and Dan 
Gillmor's Bayosphere.com uses).

Once Drupal has the capability to import and produce valid FCP XML, then 
film sequences could then be remotely edited by volunteers (possibly 
tested by using MP3 dummy files), and then imported into the master 
editing sequence to be included into the film.


FOLKSONOMIES IN DRUPAL
Drupal already has free-tagging folksonomy capabilities built in -- 
along with AJAX AutoComplete functionality in the latest HEAD version.

I went back to tag my entire blog archive with folksonomies, and Drupal 
offers a lot of exciting possibilities for experimentation.


WHAT I NEED
I have a very large set of interesting data that is ready for 
experimentation.  The problem?  I have no PHP, MySQL, database, and very 
little programming experience to start implementing the different phases 
that I've laid out in my development roadmap.

So I'm on the lookout for some theoretical & logistical help on the 
backend to help make a lot of this happen -- especially anyone with PHP, 
MySQL and Drupal experience.

I'm starting to specify what I need to end up with on the filmmaking 
end, and then trying to figure out how to get there via Drupal.  I'll 
need feedback and insights on this design -- and how to optimize the 
scalability of the systems level design.

I've been depending on volunteer labor so far -- but I'm interested in 
hearing any leads for funders who might be interested in helping 
catalyze this type of open source folksonomy development.


MY BACKGROUD
My training is as an electrical engineer with 4 1/2 years of experience 
as a radar systems engineer at Northrop Grumman working on the F/A-22 
Raptor.  But my passion has always been in filmmaking, and I worked on a 
three other feature film projects while still a professional engineer.

I quit my two years ago job to work full-time to help create a more 
interactive new media ecosystem and deliberative democracy.  My business 
model is to self-distribute The Echo Chamber documentary while keeping 
all of the new media technologies open sourced within the Drupal 
community for others to use.


POLITICAL APPLICATIONS FOR FOLKSONOMIES
CivicSpace the political organizing software that came out of the Dean 
campaign, is built upon Drupal and will be increasingly used by 
political campaigns in the next election cycle in 2006.

I hope to see some of these developed Drupal folksonomy tools applied to 
empowering citizens in the political process, and The Echo Chamber 
Project is already on the radar screen of many of the activist 
technologists leading the CivicSpace & Drupal development communities.


CONCLUSION
Anyway -- I look forward to learning more and getting some feedback on 
some of the problems I'm trying address from this listserve.

For anyone interested in learning more about this project, I aggregated 
a list of relevant links here:
http://www.echochamberproject.com/tagschema

Looking forward to the conversation,
-Kent Bye
Director, The Echo Chamber
MetaThought Productions
http://www.echochamberproject.com
207-223-5566