[DocumentCloud](http://www.documentcloud.org) visited London at the beginning of November for [the Mozilla Festival](https://mozillafestival.org/). This year’s festival focused on media, freedom and the web. DocumentCloud, a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web, fit comfortably alongside a variety of interesting participants and projects from the [news space](https://mozillafestival.org/2011/09/28/flow-media/), [software development](http://openmatt.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/popcorn-1-0-launches-at-mozilla-festival-with-exclusive-world-premiere/) and [beyond](http://jessicaklein.blogspot.com/2011/11/this-past-weekend-hackasaurus-team-was.html).
By bringing together open-source software developers, creatives, educators, activists and industry folks, Mozilla does a remarkably good job of facilitating collaborations on projects that serve the public interest. Best of all, the Mozilla Foundation holds weekly [Drumbeat calls](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/Monday_calls), open to the public, that one can join to learn about the projects and progress it’s involved in.
Mozilla’s events are unique for the breadth of the participants involved, and this year’s festival made it possible for me to get together with [Amir Bar-Lev](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0052737/), director of the documentary “The Tillman Story,” and [David Humphrey](http://vocamus.net/dave/), professor at Seneca College and Mozilla developer.
David and I put together a Popcorn.js plugin for the DocumentCloud viewer. Filmmakers like Amir, journalists and developers alike can use [Popcorn.js](http://popcornjs.org/), an open-source javascript library, to build multimedia experiences tying HTML5 elements and tools to audio/video timelines.
Once the DocumentCloud plugin is released, users will be able to tie the viewer to a video or audio presentation, allowing the content creator to open documents, jump to particular pages, and even open annotations to highlight specific document sections to viewers. In short, all of the facilities that viewers currently have access to in our viewer are now accessible to filmmakers and multimedia editors.
Our goal is to open opportunities to use the document-based reporting tools we provide into new presentations which show primary source documents to users, and allow people to explore and interact with that information, through all the modalities in which investigative work is being communicated.
Mozilla Festival image by flickr user jonathan mcintosh.
