What an amazing three days this was. I feel so inspired and blessed by everyone who turned out to participate in this event, and all the friends and colleagues who I’ve gotten to know in the process of organizing. After a much-needed days to catch up on sleep, we will get down to the work of cleaning up our event materials to post on the site, and starting on our very long list of follow-ups on things that were catalyzed at the meetings.

We will be posting all the video of our panels on the web, and some of our partners such as Bittorrent have also offered to help us distribute this. We are also considering some ways that we can make our video programs available. I know there was tremendous interest in having those available for people to peruse and view. We will at minimum have links to the work up on the web site once we get that sorted, but we are also considering other modes of distribution, including taking the show on the road in some form. If you have any ideas of interest along these lines I would welcome an email or a comment here. I thought our committee, curators, panelists, and workshop leaders did a spectacular job, and the vibe I got from everyone who attended made me believe that others felt the same. I would welcome any and all feedback over email, here on the blog, or on our web forum. We’d particularly be interested in aggregating any blog posts, photos, etc. that you may have created in association with this event.

A special thank you goes to Daniel Liss of kicktothehead, who’s mantra “Shut Up and Make Something” was the title for Ryanne’s program, and became a kind of inspirational tag line for our event.

Deep grateful-ness goes to Charlene Boehne and Mariko Oda who provided the leadership on all the organizational dimensions of the event, with the help of program coordinator Sarah Scott. Our video editor Erik Saks, with the help of Gabriel Peters-Lazarro and Francois Maurin, our web creator Rebecca Malamud, and the IML staff with the help of Jennifer Kekumu were more than wonderful and amazing in producing and running this event — even to the extent that I was able to actually enjoy the event and spend time connecting with people. No small achievement! You can see the full list of staff, supporters, and special friends at our web site.

We have just gotten word that Lawrence Lessig and Maryrose Dunton will not be able to speak at our event, both due to illness. They will be greatly missed at the gathering.

We are trying our best to offer a network infrastructure for this event both for those on site and for those who might want to tune in from afar.

The conference panels on Friday and the panel-style workshops on Sunday will be streamed live at:
http://iml.usc.edu/diy/stream. Quicktime needed.

On Friday, there will also be a Second Life feed:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/IML/60/128/52 starting at 9:30AM (SLT)

We have set up a web forum for the event for logistical information, organizing bird of a feather meetings, feedback, followups, and just general discussion. You can find it here: http://iml.usc.edu/diy/

We will have an irc channel set up on site for the backchannel lovers among you. #video247 at freenode.net.

Or if you prefer Twitter, hashtag #video247. You can post here if you want to connect with other 24/7 Twitterers: http://iml.usc.edu/diy/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4

The tag we will be using for this event is “video247.” Please use this for your blogs, video, and photos that you upload so it is easy to find and aggregate. And please post any content you have created about the event to the forum so others can find out about it — blogs, vlogs, photos! http://iml.usc.edu/diy/viewforum.php?f=7

We are getting close to our limits for academic program and workshop registrations. If you’re planning to attend, you should register soon. It looks like we’re going to have a full house.

Registration is now open for 24/7: A DIY Video Summit!

Over a year of planning and organizing has resulted in what I think is a fabulous program. Big thanks goes to our curators who have put together the video programs, and our panel organizers. Special thanks to Charlene, Mariko, and Becky and Chris for all their work in getting the web and PR materials together. It is super exciting to finally be able to officially announce the event and start to welcome attendees.

Spaces will fill up quickly for the academic program and the workshops. The hands-on workshops, where you can get practical tips on DIY video making and distribution have a very limited number of slots, so please register early if you are interested in those.

The video screenings are all free and open to the public, so for those, you just need to show up at the event.

This event has really shaped up to be something well beyond my wildest expectations. It has been hugely challenging but rewarding to coordinate a very diverse group of curators, speakers, workshop leaders, and industry participants to get together for this. It’s very important to us that word gets out to a wide range of people who have a stake in DIY, Internet and viral video, so please help us spread the word. This is meant to be an occasion for people to have conversations across the boundaries that usually separate different creative communities, technology developers, policy makers, and academics.

Registration information is here.

Our conference web site is up! Many thanks to Rebecca Malamud for the web design and Hector Catalan for the graphic design. The top page also includes an edited video from a meeting of video makers last winter that was part of the planning for the event.

We still have some work to do in finalizing parts of the program and the site but it definitely feels good to have the new web site up!

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.

Videos of the lectures in the DIY Media Seminar series are available here.

Aloha! I’m excited by the prospect of this experiment. As you can see from the first few months of our schedule, we’re lining up some interesting thinkers and doers in the fields of DIY/participatory media. Although only a room full of people in Los Angeles will be able to attend the face to face seminars, we’re hoping to involve people from around the world who share our interest in the technical, social, cultural, political, legal, economic, pedagogical facets of media such as digital video, blogs, wikis, podcasts and other means of many-to-many cultural production.

Here’s the plan: Within 24 hours of the seminar, I will post one or several blog posts about the most recent seminar, and invite participation by one and all by means of the comment threads. Please feel free to use the comments attached to this post to introduce yourselves.

Who am I? You can find out more than you need to know about me at my home website. I also blog at Smartmobs and Cooperation Commons.