Thoughts on the Wikimedia-Kaltura Partnership
By Yochai Benkler
I think the new collaboration with Wikipedia is very good news for the future of collaborative rich media, for two reasons. The first is that it will keep Kaltura honest. Wikipedia’s commitment to commons-based production is crisp,full, and longstanding. The insistence on not only commons-based content,but on open platforms fits well with Kaltura’s own strategic vision for itself, but making this collaboration so central to Kaltura’s own early development will anchor that commitment against inevitable temptations. The collaboration seems to have given Kaltura a strong push to generate a Gnash based version, so as to overcome the dependence on proprietary software, and hopefully this transition to a fully free platform will be completed. Doing so will be enormously important in order to allow full integration with the Wikipedia project and ethic. It will also allow Kaltura to commit credibly to its users that it will remain free and open source for the long haul.
The second reason is that it will provide a framework, an initial impulse, and a potential community for whom collaborative video creativity can become a common enterprise. Wikipedia has already proved that gradual accretion around discrete topics of common interest can be enough to generate collective authorship. The discreteness of the topics and the common understanding of serious purpose have been quite significant in allowing the radically decentralized peer production model that Wikipedia represents. I hope that the context – rich media for a Wikipedia article – will help focus the creativity in a very productive way, and one that will, from the very start, provide a flow of existence proofs of the potential for collaborative creativity.
My two favorites from what they have online in the announcement page http://www.kaltura.com/devwiki/index.php/Main_Page are the Venice Carnival and Tompkins Square Park. Both exhibit how public domain visual materials,combined with footage of the type that anyone with a mobile phone or digital camera can make, both stills and video, accompanied by very different types of musical backgrounds can genuinely enrich in a couple of minutes what a textual entry can educate about. They give an intuitive feel for a place in a way that only sights and sounds can.