Open as in Media

Belated post on last week'sCreative Commons Salon NYC.

Behold, the power of open media.

This month's salon, hosted again here at the TOPP office, was fantastic. Free-as-in-speech is often best served with a side of free-as-in-beer. This salon featured Dean Jansen for the Miro Project, Rachel Sterne for GroundReport.com, and the Meerkat Arts Media Collective.

Miro - formerly Democracy - is the free, open source media player that has been making (air)waves of late. Miro could change the way we access the media, decentralizing the distribution of video and audio. Miro's support of open standards has caught the eye of places like TED and German Public Broadcasting. Hey, maybe you'll see a TOPP channel some day soon.

GroundReport is bootstrapping citizen journalism.  The problem? When mainstream media fail to cover critical issues - such as the genocide in Darfur - citizens have a hard time pressuring leaders to take action. GroundReport is an alternative to the mainstream media, with a wiki-driven, CC-licensed platform for use by correspondants around the world. GroundReport incentivizes reporters, paying each a proportion of the ad revenue through their stories.

The presentations wrapped up with two short films from the Meerkat Arts Media Collective.

The event was organized by Fred Benenson of Creative Commons.