Team Miro

Hello world! This is PCF Summer Intern Chris reporting in for duty As Vilja mentioned in her last post, I’ll be posting here on a regular basis with details on all the fantastic developments we the Interns are cooking up.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with our section in the about page on the website, but I thought now would be a good time to tell you a little more about myself. I’m somewhat unique in our group in that my background is primarily in Screen Studies with a heavy dose of filmmaking on the side. Beyond that, I’m also a huge fan of this Internet thing and one of those kooky Web 2.0 Librarians in training (obligatory shout-out to Simmons GSLIS).

As hinted in a number of forum posts toward the end of our most recent Chat Event, we’re about ready to switch to GetSatisfaction, a new breed of problem-solving community oriented Webware, to replace our previous forums software.

If you’re a user of Twitter, you might already be familiar with the system, but for everyone else here’s a great page that explains how it works. And if you’re really interested, why not check out this New York Times article on the company as well.

Don’t worry about your pending question or comment stuck in the old forum software! It will still be available to our team of moderators as we make the transition. Overall, we hope this switch will enable us to better answer your questions, comments and suggestions – and we hope you’ll agree. Mick Jagger would be proud.

This summer, I’m part of an energetic group of students working on PCF’s Summer Team’08. We’re a bunch of talented Miro enthusiasts, who are generating fresh ideas and creative solutions, which will lead us to a more famous and more fabulous Miro.

At PCF, transparency is a key value. Communication serves as a tool for keeping the public informed, but even more importantly, we would like to encourage dialogue in the Miro community.

That’s why members of the Summer Team will be blogging on a weekly basis about their on-going projects and experiences with Miro. I’ll be in charge of coordinating the effort, but also blogging my heart out.

Stay tuned!

What: Miro Chat. Post a question now! (see below)
When: June 3rd @ 4:30 PM EST (20:30 UTC)
Where: http://www.getmiro.com/forum/?Page=chat or #miro on irc.freenode.net
Wiki page: http://www.getmiro.com/wiki/index.php/WeeklyMeeting

This Tuesday we will be hosting the first in a series of weekly chat meetings. Join us this week at our grand opening event, as a Software Developer for the Participatory Culture Foundation responds to your questions regarding the development of Miro. Future sessions may feature people not directly tied to PCF; we’ll cover a wide variety of different topics.

Join the chat at: http://www.getmiro.com/forum/?Page=chat OR #miro at irc.freenode.net if you’re on IRC.

We will be using the Live Question Tool to organize and select questions. Please post any questions you have for Will now at the MiroChatJune3 instance, available at the following link: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/MiroChatJune3.

The folks at Liberation, a French newspaper, chose to promote Miro for the distribution of their audio and video podcasts. Luc (our amazing French developer!) decided to translate the Liberation blog post about promoting Miro.

We asked the authors if they were OK with us reposting the translation, and they were!

 The article in full:

We confess, we played with the Miro Internet video player for quite a while. With the same peaceful impression than the Videolan  audio-video player: you just have to click a video and it works. Whatever the video, without having to bother with formats, with .mpg, .flv or .mp4. Without having to fight with a user manual. Without having to go through YouTube or DailyMotion. With Miro, we watch ‘Les Concerts à emporter’ (http://www.concertsaemporter.com/),  public domain movies (https://www.miroguide.com/channels/1039) and  american video podcasts (https://www.miroguide.com/channels/625). We can also watch the Liberation videos (http://www.libelabo.fr/category/dvd-cinoque).

iTunes is efficient too. It reads videos perfectly -audio too- and,  miracle, synchronize them with an iPod. But only if those podcasts  are published by a site where productions have been tinkered for  hours so they are readable by iTunes. And only if you have an iPod - and not a Creative player or any other. iTunes is by far the most efficient audio, video and podcast player when everyone -the audience as well as the publishers- accepts to eat Apple, breath Apple, and sleep Apple. In that case, then yes, Apple is the best, the most simple, the coolest. This is why so many people use Apple software without giving it another thought. It’s also why no publisher can ignore Apple. That’s specifically the case of LibéLabo and Libération in general: our audio podcasts work with the Appled branded products and we even launched an innovative service on the iPhone (http://iphone.liberation.fr/).

Our desire to publish our programs on iPod and others is not a walk in the park: this morning, before writing this post, I sent an email to my contacts at Apple France to ask them to push some of our programs on the forefront of the iTunes Store. In december, I wrote them that I was surprised that the illustration pictures of our podcasts did not show up on their store, for no specific reason, while they were showing up correctly on all other podcast directories, like Podemus. I waited. And the the pictures showed up. I don’t know why. Neither their documentation nor the Apple people explained it to me, and I can only say: thank you Apple. Thank you, thank you to allow us to reach a larger audience.

With Miro it’s nothing like that: it’s free software (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.fr.html), which aims at playing videos -and sounds- coming from everywhere, without favoring such and such. It targets efficiency AND freedom for the user. Does this puzzle you ? Obviously: it’s hard to grasp how the production of free software -which aren’t controled by a single company- radicaly differs from the Microsoft or Apple way. Some half-monks-half-soldier dudes have worked to death for years trying to explain this difference, here (http://www.april.org/articles/intro/ll.html) or there (http://www.framasoft.net/article3338.html).

At Libé, we currently don’t have the time or the energy to spend hours formatting our videos for Apple, following the Apple rules when they actually agree to give them to us. Our job, is information for everyone, not information for Apple users, even if they are a lot.

So, here. After many hesitations and tests, we have decided, at LibéLabo, to rely on Miro -and all other open software- to publish our videos. To encourage you to use this software. To accept and comprehend what it involves: reading our videos on your iPod will be difficult, at least for some time. If you have an Apple shaped tatoo on your arm, you might find us a bit inefficient, or not hype. We already feature two programs which you can subscribe to using Miro: the “5 jours à la Une” (http://www.libelabo.fr/category/5-jours-a-la-une/, where the Libération board looks back at the news of the week using the front pages of Libé) and the “DVD du cinoque” (http://www.libelabo.fr/category/dvd-cinoque/, commentaries for movie buffs). One day soon, these programs will also be available on the iTunes Store and on your iPods. Even if it’s against our philosophy, we will make this effort.

And while writing all this, I’m even sure that Apple won’t be angry with Libé: they know it very well, individually, the employees of Jobs’ company, that we all have the same goal: to not make information a prisoner of the technology. At Libération, we want to be faithful to our name even if it’s a difficult goal. And we will of course answer to all your questions or call for helps, whatever tool you are using.

To download Miro, go here (http://www.getmiro.com/).

Hey everybody. Now that Miro has reached the big 1.0, we need to make the documentation better for our users. That’s why I’m asking everybody to please, take a look at the documentation at http://getmiro.com/documentation and lend us a hand. You can log in using the forum (http://getmiro.com/forum) username and password. If you don’t have one, you can head over there to get one. We really appreciate your support and assistance. If you have any questions, please direct them to the Team Miro mailing list (http://participatoryculture.org/mailman/listinfo/teammiro) and we’ll get back to you. Thanks.

Hey folks. Mailing list update with the correct URL.

http://participatoryculture.org/mailman/listinfo/teammiro

Hey there. Contarc here with another update on Team Miro. Just wanted to let everybody know that we now have a Mailing List. You can subscribe by going to the following URL. http://participatoryculture.org/pipermail/teammiro/

When you subscribe, you’ll be able to interact which the Team Miro community on the latest changes and join discussions regarding Miro and its affiliated projects. Hope to see you there!

Hey everybody. Contarc here. I’m one of the members of Team Miro, now leading the documentation team. We are trying to do a major overhaul on the documentation and need your help. We are looking for volunteers who can write articles, and help shape the Miro documentation into something kickin’.

For more on this, join us tomorrow (Tuesday 30th of October) at 4:30EST for our weekly meeting on the chatroom or #miro @ irc.freenode.org. Details on Team Miro are available on our official site. I’ll be posting here on a weekly basis to keep you up to date on the Team Miro progress. See you in the chat!