COSSFest 2010

On April 9th & 10th, Calgary Open Source Software advocates held a 2 day festival to discuss the challenges facing open source software, and promote its adoption.

Downloadable and Creative Commons licensed recyclable copies of the video coverage can be found on Internet Archive. (Anyone without full Flash support in their browser might need to access the lectures that way.) But for YouTube hosted copies, I decided to experiment with YouTube Annotation Hyperlinks. They allow you to link from within one YouTube video to another. This allows me to show a brief summary of every event, and let the viewer click through if they would like to learn more.

Video - Elizabeth May discusses Oil Sands

Elizabeth May was at Calgary Petroleum Club discussing the future of oil sands development with Deborah Yedlin & Murray Smith. Creative Commons licensed copy available at Internet Archive, including original sounds board audio.

Video - Calgary's Low Carbon Future

On 2009-09-18, over 200 Calgarians gathered at SAIT to help advance Calgary's energy efficiency. In a future where the environmental costs of carbon are factored into economic decisions, how can an energy city like Calgary stay competitive?

Mayor of Calgary Dave Bronconnier points out our city is the largest consumer of renewable energy in Canada, and all city operations will be powered by renewable energy by 2012. Targeting the carbon footprint of City of Calgary's municipal operations will help keep our tax rates competitive as the cost of carbon starts to climb, but it does not guarantee our energy sector will continue to prosper.

Attendees brainstormed solutions in 5 categories:

• "Energy Efficiency and Conservation"
• "Energy Financing"
• "Energy Awareness, Research and Training"
• "Energy Sourcing / Renewable Energy Sources"
• "Energy Legislation"

...which were then voted on. Top-ranked ideas were re-articulated by attendees in a manner to make them implementable and measurable.

Was it successful? Well it seemed good ideas were shared, and other than allowing more time for the teams to brainstorm and articulate I thought the exercises were extremely practical. It will be up to Calgarians, Imagine Calgary and PlanIt Calgary to see quantifiable results come of this.

I created an editorialized video which uses Skid Crease's themeweaving as narrative structure. It has been shortened to 56 minutes and is the easiest way for non-attendees to understand the summit. The video is called "Calgary's Low Carbon Future" and is available at R4NT.com.

I've isolated the meatiest presentation (by Rob Macintosh), documenting the challenge to Calgary's economy and how we can rapidly more to address it...

And the whole thing is available in chronological order as a single YouTube video... ...which I've chapter indexed at my personal blog.

The Rob Macintosh keynote, and chronological coverage (with and without presentation slides) can all be found in downloadable recyclable formats at Internet Archive. Videos are Creative Commons licensed.

Video & Stock - Allyson Smith

Allyson Smith, the Calgary-born comedian who's currently a contender for Canadian Comedy Awards 2009 "Best Female Standup", let me start videotaping her (extremely funny) Calgary shows in November 2008. This coverage was combined with David Gluzman's sit-down interview to create a pretty-darn-tight R4NT.com video and article.

Creative Commons licensed raw footage of my walk-and-talk interview with Allyson Smith can be found on Internet Archive.

Video - Do It Yourself

Short created in 24 hours for Calgary's 2009 FilmRacing competition. The is the same edit submitted to the competition, but rendered in HDV instead of SD (NTSC) resolution. Created by on-site team of Wil Knoll, Rachel Gertz, Gordon McDowell & Sarah Blue. Blaise Kolodychuk & Ben Blue (independently of each other) contributed music based solely on the script (as we had to keep everything possible running in parallel). If you'd like to recycle any of the footage, a downloadable MPEG-4 1280x720 master can be found at Internet Archive.

Video - CBC Rally in Calgary

On 2009-04-17, Calgarians headed to CBC's broadcast building on Memorial Drive to show their support for CBC, and to protest lack of support of CBC by the (currently conservative) federal government. I carted down a sign and videocamera, and after waving at traffic for 10 minutes ("is this what we do?") started asking fellow attendees questions about the CBC. The finished video is embedded in a R4NT.com blog post of a fictional nature.

Possibly the best point on the subject of CBC funding was articulated by DJ Kelly and Wil Knoll (but unfortunately captured by IndieCalgary.com and not myself): (paraphrased)

Although the CBC has become more self sufficient in its reliance on its ad revenue there was never an expectation of self sufficiency when the CBC was first created, and it is not fair to have that expectation now. CBC has been lucky that ad revenue has offset rising costs to taxpayers, but we're here to say we'll gladly pay for our CBC, and return to the original model which does not depend on ad revenues.

CBC currently costs Canadian taxpayers $34 per year, per citizen. I'm happy to pay that. In fact, as I explore this world of blogging, video production and avoiding anything that resembles what an investigative journalist would actually do, I'm quite certain that strong public broadcasting is key to maintaining a democracy through this transition period from newspapers to... whatever will replace newspapers.

Various remix friendly version of CBC Rally in Calgary and raw footage are released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Video - Calgary Hearts Dubya

This is the video accompanying my R4NT.com article of the same name. It was created to highlight the fact, George Bush will be speaking at Calgary TELUS Convention Centre on March 17 2009. A protest is scheduled for 11:30 AM in front of the convention centre.

Recyclable footage can be found at Internet Archive (the 661 MB MPEG-4 is the highest quality available at 1280x720). And a 640x360 MPEG-4 render is also available on Blip.TV.

The video is placed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Video - Richard Stallman at UofC

On 2009-02-03, Richard Stallman gave a talk on free software and copyright. Since it is going to take many days to finish uploading all the raw footage to Internet Archive, I'll keep updating this entry as more formats (including free/libre formats) become available.

OGG THEORA video: (only edited version so far with super crisp frames)
http://www.archive.org/download/20090203-Richard-Stallman-UofC-01/20090203-Stallman-UofC-v19-512x288-vbr2500.ogm

OGG VORBIS audio:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Gordonmcdowell-RichardStallmanAtUofC884.ogg

MP3 audio:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Gordonmcdowell-RichardStallmanAtUofC423.mp3

MP4 video at 1280x720x30fps:
http://www.archive.org/download/20090203-Richard-Stallman-UofC-01/20090203-Stallman-UofC-v19-720p-vbr2500.mp4

MP4 video at 640x360x30fps:
http://www.archive.org/download/20090203-Richard-Stallman-UofC-01/20090203-Stallman-UofC-v19-640x360-vbr1635.mp4

Video - Calgary Centre Debate 2008

Coverage of Calgary's federal ridings now includes Calgary Centre. I live and work in Calgary Centre and it is my employer Cambrian House which is facilitating this coverage.

Calgary Centre Candidate Debate transcript published here. There are also Blip.TV hosted MPEG-4 and MP3 files.

Video - DemoCampCalgary #10

Coverage of DemoCampCalgary #10. If you live in Calgary and either want to launch your own startup, find a more interesting place to work or even just see what's coming down the local software pipeline then check DemoCamp out.

Oh, and there's beer.

The highest quality source for recycling this footage is 648 MB Windows Media file, which is what Blip.Tv has transcoded into FLV.

Stock: Calgary Sunrise

Timelapse shot of Calgary sunrise sped up 100x. Or is it a sunset? I'll never tell. Ok, its a sunrise.

Internet Archive is hosting:
  Windows Media Video (preview),
  MPEG-4 (preview, playable in QuickTime),
  MPEG-2 (720p HD, for production).