Dear NYC Wikimedians, Please consider attending and spreading the word about this conference we're organizing. We've just confirmed a talk with Erik Moeller and Michael Dale about "Collaborative Video in Wikipedia," which we're very excited to add to the mix! Thanks, Elizabeth ----------------------------------------- * Register now!* http://openvideoconference.org/registration/ on Twitter/Identi.ca: @openvideo on Facebook: http://is.gd/xeL8 June 19-20, 2009 New York City 40 Washington Square South (NYU Law School) http://openvideoconference.org *Details* The Open Video Conference is a two-day gathering of thought leaders in technology, business, public policy, art, and activism from around the world to explore the future of the moving image. Thanks to a proliferation of tools for recording, editing, and distributing video online, anyone can be a broadcaster. Sites like YouTube are bursting at the seams with user-created content. Individuals armed with cell phone cameras are effectively citizen journalists. And emerging artistic forms like video commentary and remix/mashup create new vocabularies for creative and political expression. Yet as the medium matures, we face a crossroads. Will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture—one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture? Web video holds tremendous potential, but limits on broadband, playback technology, and fair use threaten to undermine the ability of individuals to engage in dialogues in and around this new media ecosystem. *Highlights* Bestselling author Clay Shirky will give a talk about the disruptive effects of the web. Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain (TBC) will moderate a discussion on platform innovation with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, and representatives from YouTube and Adobe. Lizz Winstead, activist and co-creator of The Daily Show, will discuss web video as political commentary. Legendary hacker Jon Lech Johansen (DVD Jon) will address data portability. Mozilla, makers of the Firefox web browser, will highlight what it's doing to cement open video standards. You'll hear from Anthony Falzone—executive director at Stanford's Fair Use Project and counsel to graphic artist Shepherd Fairey—about the new battle lines drawn around fair use. Voices from the blogosphere, public media, and traditional media will explore the ways to make their content work in an open video ecosystem. Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, will highlight the ways telecom policy hinders independent media, and much more. This is just a peek—have a look at our schedule page for more details: http://www.openvideoconference.org/agenda. In addition to two full days of high-profile programming, you can expect a slate of workshops and behind-the-scenes technical working groups with leading edge video developers from projects like VLC, Ogg Theora, GStreamer, Blender, PiTiVi, Miro, Kaltura, Firefox, and many more. This event should interest anyone with a stake in art, culture, technology, policy, journalism, or online business. *Registration* Registration entitles you to all conference benefits: talks and presentations, workshops, screenings, two lunches, and a cool afterparty featuring video turntablists Eclectic Method. Plus you'll get to mingle with thought leaders in online video and take home a cool bag of schwag! Don't wait—register at http://www.openvideoconference.org/registration. *Organizers* Our conference co-organizers are Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale ISP, iCommons, and Kaltura. Our partners include Mozilla, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Free Press, Creative Commons, Big Think, NYU Information Law Institute, Intelligent TV, The Workbook Project, FGV Brazil CTS, NEXA Italy, and more. For more information, contact conference(a)openvideoalliance.org.