C@talyst was involved in webcasting a number of events over
the years. There was an upload-station on King Street during
one of the early Reclaim the Streets parties. I wasn't
involved in those so I'll let the protagonists talk about
it.
Coming out of these experients it was clear that webcasts
had to be opened up to be more accessible. The people
involved with the early webcasts were coding pages by hand
and uploading them, managing the whole thing manually. This
does it easy for the average activist or observer to quickly
whack up some media. It's also very time-consuming and in
the heat of a fast-moving event you're unlikely to be able
to keep up.
So the idea of webcasting software was born. The software
would handle multiple formats of media (audio, video, text,
images, whatever) using free software on donated hardware,
the sort of gear C@talyst has.
It would be easy for non-geek people to upload their content
for the webcast. As items were added, the site would update
itself and handle what would be on the front page, all the
latest items. By clicking through from the front page to the
end page you could see, visually, the flow of events and the
order in which things were added to the site. Individual
items could also be joined together into a single story so,
for example, many photos of a particular event would be
grouped together.
Nearly all of this work and vision for this software came
from C@talysts two resident uber-geeks, Maffew and Andy.
They put in more than a couple of late-night coding sessions
to get it all working.
Maffew has written a paper about the politics of open
publishing. While I doubt he would claim these ideas were
all as well thought out as they are today at the time, the
nucleus of the open publishing concept was there way back
then.
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~matthewa/catk/openpub.html
The big day for all this work was J18 or June 18, 1999. A
global day of action against capitalism. In cities around
the world, various actions and protests were going on. See
the global site for information about it:
http://www.j18.org/
In Sydney it promised to be a big day with hundreds of
different, autonomous actions going on around the city.
C@talyst decided to put this new idea to the test and set up
a webcast of the whole day.
Based at the Nature Conservation Council of NSW's offices
http://www.nccnsw.org.au in Kent Street, a motley collection
of media and computer hackers converged to bring the news
from the streets. People were encouraged to bring their
videos, photos, text and audio up from the various actions
and upload it. We had a bunch of equipment including video
digitisers, sounds cards and the like connected over a small
modem connection to the Net.
The site is still running as a record of what happened that
day: http://j18.cat.org.au
Andy and Maffew spent much of the day fixing bugs and
keeping the whole thing going. In the meantime others of us
raced around town interviewing people, taking photos and
telling people about the webcast. A surprising amount of
stuff was collected. I even managed to get a ticket for
riding on the footpath and not having a bell (!) on my
bicycle as I raced back from ERA's headquarters with some
hot audio. http://j18.cat.org.au/display.php3?article_id=99
Questions for other people involved:
* Can someone talk about the earlier webcasts?
* Did this pre or post-date Active Sydney and the
calendaring stuff?
* I think Cameron may well have been involved in coding at
this stage but I'm not sure.
* Of course please comment. I'm thick-skinned and can take
criticism :)
* Hmmm the formatting options on this faq-o-matic are
somewhat counter-intuitive. Oh well.
simon (at) rumble.net
