Constitutional Law

Open Media Publishing: One New Option

By J.D. Lasica

EngageMedia, an Australia-based open media organization that promotes social justice and environmental issues, has just released a major open source software package called Plumi.

Based on the Plone content-management system, it's designed to let citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box.

Given that websites like YouTube and Yahoo Video retain extensive rights to your video while keeping their own distribution platforms under lock and key,  Plumi is one of the important new forces pushing toward democratic, independent and open media.

For the announcement and technical details, head here.

To download Plumi, head here.

A demo site can be found here.

A full list of Plumi's features can be found here.

New Plumi Sites Several organizations have installed Plumi video-sharing sites in the past few months in Italy, Japan and Africa. The software runs such sites as:

• EngageMedia.org
  
• World Social Forum TV
  
• Italy's CabTube
  
• Africa on TV
• Japan's Contents Portal Shikoku

Full post as published by MediaShift Idea Lab on February 14, 2008 (boomark / email).