History of the visionontv project
The original project was offlinetv and was a online network to setup screenings to bring people together and cross fertilize different radical campaigning groups. I was pushing it as “open” rebooting of the failing undercurrents video activism project.
Before this I had been making a meager living doing screenings by fundraising vie the copyleft ruffcuts video CD project. With the transitioning from dialup to broadband internet speed there was a possibility to move the distribution of screening quality video off physical media to the spreading peer2peer web.
As you will continue to see through my narration here my core thinking changes little. The first dotcon (enclosures) boom had bust, the web was still a health open network though the “open” pioneers were being pushed out by more mainstream fashionista people, these people were being snapped up by the next wave of dotcon funding so the clock was ticking on the next boom (and attempt as enclosing the web for control and profit).
Fashionista´s were all over the open web, conferences, events, media. Geeks were developing open standards - each one unlinked/incompatible with the next it was a fun time for “open”. This flowering of geek culture had its fashionista side, there were 100 applications for zipping files or FTP and no easy to use open tools - the geek problem.
P from undercurrents got involved to do the funding side, a lot of “brainstorming” was done. During this time we see a “splitting” of the project. It was obvious that streaming video - that is a technology for watching video real time without having a local copy was going to grow to dominate the next dotcon boom and the fashionistas were buying into this big time.
This is a client server technology - from one to many - its old (traditional) media distribution. At the same time the was a subculture flowering or peer2peer technology being used for “free content” this was a “native” open web technology.
The “splitting” was around a miscommunication/misunderstanding of what was going to happen in the next 5 years. And “funding” pushed this in a bad way, it was easy to talk to funders about “online video” it was fashionista mainstream. Few had any thought to the “cost” of jumping on the dotcon fashionista wave. And in time the rise of the dotcons from the second boom that was rising for all to see.
The “brainstorming” lead to the project being renamed visionOntv - just for the funding and outreach - much easier to get funding. Why would anyone be interested in offlinetv and peer2peer technologies all the value was about “owning” online space. That is enclosing the commons was unthinkingly embraced as a good thing - a touch on controlfreekery.
This simple change was the first step to the project losing direction and stalling.