Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["M. David Peterson" <xmlhacker AT gmail.com>]

Hey All,

via Sylvain Hellegouarch (Cc'd) I learned of the TAKEAWAY Festival taking place in the UK (see **).  I don't have a lot of details, but I do know that Sylvain learned of this from Michael Sparks (Cc'd), Lead Researcher @ BBC UK R&D, and the mastermind behind the development of Kamaelia (
http://kamaelia.org/ '''redirects to SF.net home).  Apparently Michael was invited to be a part of this, but past that, I don't have a lot more details.

That said, it seemed like this would be a good opportunity to connect some dots that may not be currently connected.  These dots include,

Kamaelia
CCDC and in particular ccHost/ccMixter
channelCC.tv
TAKEAWAY Festival

What is Kamaelia?
---@
http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Introduction

> Lego/K'nex for programmers. For people. For building things. It's about
> making concurrency on systems easier to use, so easy you forget that
> you're using it.

...

A key aim of Kamaelia is to enable even novice programmers to create scalable and safe concurrent systems, quickly and easily

...

The reason for concurrency here isn't because we're after performance, but due to the problems we're facing are naturally concurrent - millions of people watching content. Therefore, the aim is to make dealing with this concurrency simple/easy, or natural/fun. Hence the lego/K'nex analogy. 

The vision of CCDC
---@http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Developer

The primary goal of the Creative Commons Developer Community (CCDC) is to build a community of developers around the development of tools facilitating Creative Commons' licenses and standards. 

What is channelCC.tv?
---@http://channelcc.tv (<- yeah, not much there at the moment ;-)
[MDP::Insert.Comment: This is an unfinished project (Hi Melissa! :D (Also Cc'd)) I started a while back and would like to finish, but this time around using a combination of both technology and ideas from the various folks and their related software tools referenced in this post.
 

What is Kamaelia used for?

---@http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Introduction

At R&D we've used it for sending subtitles to mobiles, building a networked audio mixer matrix, previewing PVR content on mobiles, joining multicast islands together using application layer tunneling and also a game for small children :-)

I also use Kamaelia for all my presentations these days.

Kamaelia has been used by BBC Radio & Music to produce a record of transmission (for 8 BBC channels 24x7). This is a development box for internally monitoring what is actually broadcast vs what the EPG data says. This enables prototyping of new services (subject to all sorts of restrictions). Examples include podcasts of all of BBC radio, particular tastes or genres. That then allows people to decide if they want these things and decide how to move forward with the industry.

What are some of the tools developed, maintained, and supported by CCDC?

---@ http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Developer

Creative Commons actively develops the following software projects:

• ccPublisher
• ccHost (ccMixter source code)
• Translator - http://translate.creativecommons.org/
• ccLookup
• Command Line Tools
• CcNutch

How does ChannelCC.tv fit in?

Not a clue.  But I have some ideas, and it seems to me that between (Michael/BBC-UK R&D/Kamaelia) && (CCDC*) all of the tools are in place to do some pretty cool things.

How does the TAKEAWAY Festival fit in? 

Again, not a clue, but as outlined below, it seems there could be some interesting points of connection with all of this.

** --- @http://nodel.org/events.php?ID=51

TAKEAWAY Festival - Do It Yourself Media   http://www.takeawayfestival.com part of "Experiment, play and get involved", " TAKEAWAY festival of do-it-yourself media" event clusters 

> A silent revolution is taking place. People are transforming themselves
> from media consumers to producers, using the new tools, software and
> technologies at their disposal. From the expanding realm of free and
> open source software (FLOSS), to peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution and
> 'pervasive' mobile and locative technologies, the unprecedented
> possibilities exist to create and disseminate our own media experiences.
>
> TAKEAWAY Festival – Do It Yourself Media
> is here to help you take part in the revolution, and to understand what
> it's all about. Learn how to make your own online journal, blog, live
> stream or wiki in our workshops. Talk to those who are making the tools
> and those who are finding new and innovative ways to make use of them.
> Discuss the implications of 'free' and P2P culture, changes in how we
> make culture and art, and how we will be able to live, and learn, in
> the coming media environment.
>
> What can you take away from
> TAKEAWAY Festival? Workshops, exhibitions, lectures and discussions are
> designed to give you a hands-on experience and first hand knowledge of
> networked and interactive media.

NOTE: It seems http://www.takeawayfestival.com is presently down.  Hopefully that will change soon.

---

So with all of this, this is really meant as a dot connecting and pump priming piece to possibly get some ideas started and moving forward.  Would also like to connect in MusicianForge (see: 
http://dev.musicianforge.net/ ) and SonicRadar (http://blog.sonicradar.com) (see: 
http://blog.sonicradar.com/2007/03/08/a-little-introduction/ for an introduction from Eric Larson (Cc'd), Lead Architect for both projects), -- something I have held back from announcing more widespread due to some preparation work of some other related pieces -- but at this stage it seems best to focus on one idea at a time ;-)

That said, the reality is that there is probably no direct need to respond to this thread, or even keep this thread active.  But hopefully some of the dots connected will help spur some ideas which will in turn spawn new threads between various folks and whatever these ideas happen to be.  So with that, enjoy your dev-days! :D

-- 
/M:D

M. David Peterson
http://mdavid.name | http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2354 | 
http://dev.aol.com/blog/3155