The value of face time

Beatriz Busaniche

One of the presenters at the #GLAMwiki conferences in London and Paris was Beatriz. She brought us the wonderful news that Wikimedia Argentia had been given many, many DVD's with original news footage from the public Argentinian broadcaster. Many of these news items have found there way to the Spanish Wikipedia and this generated so much interest that other Argentinian networks are considering following this great initiative.

Such a treasure trove is both a responsibility and a commitment and in the Free Content world it is best to share the load. Sharing is hard when all the data is stored on physical objects. This was discussed by attendees of both conferences and the results are encouraging.

OpenBeelden is an open media platform giving easy access to audiovisual collections and facilitates easy reuse. It is an implementation of the MMBase content management system and both are freely licensed. OpenBeelden is used to make many Dutch news items available.

The 109 messages of the OpenBeelden software are now available for localisation at translatewiki.net. When this works out well, even the localisation of MMBase may become a translatewiki project.

Once the OpenBeelden is translated in Spanish, there is a platform to manage all the news items from the DVDs. This will surely allow Beatriz to share the wonderful resource she is the custodian of.

Thanks,
     GerardM