[Debconf-video] Debian and Miro Community
Hi Debconf video team,
So, hi. I'm working with the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) on
Miro Community. I'm also a person who works on packages in Debian every
once in a while, and goes to Debconfs whenever I can.
Miro Community is free, Django-based, AGPLv3-licensed software that anyone
can use to create a curated video collection on the web. We also host
instances of it, like http://debian.mirocommunity.org/. Participatory
Culture Foundation is a US-based non-profit that is dedicated to
supporting a democratic media by creating open and decentralized video
tools and services. Lately we've been asking Miro Community sites with a
lot of videos, custom options, or multiple admins to help us offset
hosting and software development costs.
Tiago wrote a post here
<http://tiagovaz.org/weblog/index.cgi/english/20110406.01-bye-miro-community>
about it. As y'all know, debian.mirocommunity.org is above a few of the
limits of our free-of-cost hosting tier.
There are a few reasonable ways forward:
* Debian can self-host a Miro Community instance; I'm happy to help with
that. I'm the upstream maintainer, and if someone else wants to do
packaging, I can do what I can to make that easy. That's likely to be the
most satisfying scenario for Debian. If we (Debian) are lacking a shell
account to run MC on, then I can let people have access to the VM I'm
using for expo.debian.net.
* Debian can participate in the tiers like anyone else, and maybe do a
small fundraiser to pay for the new hosting.
http://mirocommunity.org/signup/ explains what tiers there are.
* If Tiago and other people here do like Miro Community, then PCF be
willing to donate some Miro Community hosting, so long as we (Debian) keep
the MC site active and well-promoted. Anne (CC:d) is the outreach
coordinator for Miro Community, and we're really interested in having
people use and hear about Miro Community. As I understand it, PCF is
willing to help out Debian if helps spread the word about MC, and isn't
too onerous in terms of sysadmin+development time.
Whether or not we (Debconf/Debian) end up going with MC, hosted by PCF or
not, I want to reiterate some important features of MC:
* It's free software. You can patch it and change the way videos embed.
* The code (tries to) use the native HTML5 video player in browsers where
we detect it. (If we fail to use HTML5 native players where possible, it's
a bug, and you should file it in Bugzilla.)
* It was *designed* to let you embed videos from elsewhere on the web.
There's no need to re-upload videos to it.
* You can integrate it with Universal Subtitles, so that captioning and
translating video text is easy. Will Kahn-Greene is working on adding some
UI for this <http://bluesock.org/~willg/blog/pmc/psf_grant_2011.html>, and
you can actually use it right now if you're willing to go through an extra
step when adding videos, or customize the theme. (PCF would be happy to
let Debian use a free 'max' account to make this easier if the site stays
actively-maintained.)
I'll try to be better at reviewing patches going forward, too. The best
way to reach me about Miro Community issues is the #miro-hackers channel
on irc.freenode.net. (I'm paulproteus there.)
I, personally, think it would be great if Debian uses MC, hosted by PCF or
otherwise.
So that's things from my perspective. What do you all think?
-- Asheesh.
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