For those of you who have been hanging around this blog and the Annenberg Center at USC, you probably know that a group of us have been working on planning a festival of DIY video. This has been in the works ever since we finished the Networked Publics event last spring, and we are finally at the point where it is starting to take shape and we’d like to officially announce that it is happening.

We are calling the event “24/7: A DIY Video Summit” and it will take place in Los Angeles on February 8-10, 2008. (Thanks to Anne Bray for the coming up with the name!) The goal of the event is to showcase and celebrate the very best in DIY, amateur, and non-commercial Internet video. We will be looking across a wide variety of existing video communities and genres, including independent video, political remix, machinima, anime music videos, live action vidding, youth media, video blogging, grassroots/amateur news and documentary. In addition to the screening of video works, we will also hold workshops and have an academic program.

Our motivation for planning this event is to bring together the wide variety of communities that have a stake in the evolution of Internet video. We are at a pivotal moment where we are seeing an explosion of new forms of video expression online that is disrupting existing models for media communication. Technology infrastructures, legal standards, and creative genres are very much up for grabs. We want to convene an event which will foster conversations across different creative communities, technology developers and service providers, academics, and policy makers. Our goal is to serve the interests of the broader Internet video community, but more specifically to support the public interest and noncommercial video production that is happening at a grassroots level.

The amount of interest and enthusiasm that I’ve received from people in the creative, academic, and industry communities has been overwhelming. Clearly this is an idea who’s time has come, and I am super excited to be working on this together with a fabulous team of organizers and curators. I’ll be co-chairing the event together with Adrienne Russell, and working with the conference committee and advisors which includes Steve Anderson, Wally Baer, Anne Bray, Charlene Boehne, Mariko Oda, Howard Rheingold, Aram Sinnreich, and Jennifer Urban, We have a group of rockstar video creators for this year’s inaugural curatorial committee: Mindy Faber (youth media), Ryanne Hodson (vlogging), Paul Marino (machinima), Jonathan McIntosh (political remix), Tim Park (AMVs) Eric Saks (arts/independent video), Laura Shapiro (vidding), Jon Stout (documentary).

The official conference site is still under construction, but is here. We have also launched a live journal community to discuss related topics. Over the next year, we will be working on curating our video program, setting up a “challenge” for soliciting new video works, finding industry partners and sponsors, and planning workshops and an academic program. We’ll continue to use this blog to post updates on how things are going with the planning.

A big thank you goes to the Annenberg Center which has provided the seed funding for this event and the current seminar series, and supported the Network Publics event last year which was the precursor to this current effort.

We welcome feedback and suggestions from the diverse communities involved in DIY and Internet video as we move forward with the planning for this event.