J5’s Blog

As a culmination of all the positive momentum that has been going on the past few years all the important Open Video players will be gathering at NYU’s law center for the first of hopefully many Open Video Conferences on June 19th.

The interesting part of this conference is it isn’t exclusively a tech conference. According to their website:

Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

If we have any hopes of success in bringing the general public an understanding of our views on the importance of openness and freedom, forming a larger community with like minded content creators is the next logical step and another piece of the puzzle.

I will be attending the conference as a representative for GNOME. Others should consider registering and attending to represent their own media minded project. I hope to see you there.

Since Mozilla decided to back ogg Vorbis and Theora as a baseline standard, Monty committed to leading the charge for a better encoder, Edward Hervey has been kicking butt and taking names with PiTiVi and now Blizzard has blogged about Dailymotion using open codecs, everything seems to be falling nicely into place. One can’t help but admire building momentum.

View Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009 locations in a larger map

I’ve started a publicly editable Google map for this years GUADEC/Akademy Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I’ve added a few of the recommended hotels and the conference venue so attendees can get an idea of the distances and locations between each place. Please add any information that would be useful to attendees including the rest of the hotel list, event locations and gathering spots. I hope to see a lot of new and old faces at the conference in July.

UPDATE: Behdad pointed me to a more complete map.

On the heals of having my talk accepted I’ve booked my flight to this years GUADEC/Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Much thanks goes out to my manager Tom “spot” Callaway for finding funds for my airfare. I think it shows a lot of support and commitment from Fedora/Redhat even though I am not in the Desktop group anymore.

My talk is happening sometime during the core days and I will be talking about Open Web Services, open data exchange between projects and melding server side and client side to build an open community of applications. After working on d-bus and seeing the success a standard IPC platform has brought the richness of our desktop I believe it is time we expand that meme to include standard application interaction across the physical barriers of the Desktop. It is time to bring the (N)etwork back into G(N)OME while keeping true to our Free and Open Source roots.