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
View Comments (4)
The YouTube censoring of the anti-Scientology video, brought up in the comments to Dan Schulz's post, point to the importance of decentralizing online video and keeping a significant portion of the hosting in noncommercial or simply more varied control.
Indeed Ben, that was kind of interesting to learn about (although YouTube seems to have put the video back up... There's still lots of fishyness going on and the point is still there)
J.D. - if a site uses Plumi is it in any way linked with other sites that use Plumi? (i.e. does it facilitate a decentralized community while isolating that community from other similar communities? Or does it facilitate connection between decentralized communities)
Hi,
Andrew here from EngageMedia/Plumi.
You could easily link up Plumi sites in a variety of ways (common logins, shared rss). This linking doesn't automatically happen though as it's probably a bit presumptuous in terms of thinking all video sites would want to share their content/logins with each other. The tools are certainly there though and I agree with the sentiment that creating an isolated community makes a site less effective.
Cool stuff:)
Yeah I agree about the presumptuousness of having that enabled by default, I was just curious if it was supported -- sounds like it is!