Interview

Interview with Nicholas Reville from Participatory Culture Foundation

by Paddy Johnson

Participatory Culture Foundation is amongst the most well known Internet activist groups working today, and is comprised of 8 full time employees and several part time staff. The core members of this collective first began activist work in 2003, with the launch of Downhill Battle, a website dedicated to music activism. Today, they are focusing their efforts on software development for video broadcasting on the web. Coding is not something many associate with the field of Fine Art, but because it is the structure designers build upon, it is as important as a properly stretched canvas is to a painter. What's more, the standards of good web design are often determined by functionalist aesthetics, which means that the best designers typically code a lot of work themselves. I spoke to Nicholas Reville, a founding member of Participatory Culture Foundation, over the phone in early October, and we discussed the work the foundation is doing now, and the role web aesthetics play in the development these projects. -- Paddy Johnson

Paddy Johnson: You began working on the music activism site Downhill Battle in 2003, which is an ongoing project, but seems no longer to be the focus of the organization. You are pretty much exclusively focusing on the development of the Democracy Player right now is that correct?

Nicholas Reville: Yeah, we’re pretty much focused on that 100% at this point. Well, actually there are two projects that have come out of working with the same group of people. Democracy Player is the furthest along, and has been going along for about a year and a half now, and we’re sort of hitting our stride in terms of getting close to a 1.0 release. There’s also a project we’ve started that Tiffiniy Cheng is leading up called Open Congress, and that’s even a separate organization – for various legal reasons these are all sort of separate projects, -- but, that’s a site that is trying to make information about Congress more accessible, more transparent….You can sort of see that we are doing things that are on the one hand very different, you know downhill battle is a music activism campaign, democracy is a software project, and open congress is a government transparency website, but they’re all united by the same ideas of openness and a more democratic media and a more participatory culture.

PJ: Right. And the Democracy Player fits into this because it gives viewers so much more choice. As I understand it, this is a software device that acts the same ways a channel guide does on your TV, but unlike TV, you can watch web programming at your leisure. And you determine the programming entirely on your own (unlike cable packages for TV which give you a preset choice of channels). It seems to me, the best way to describe this for bloggers would be to call it a bloglines for video. You guys have a great demo on your site that explains how the player works really clearly, like how to use it etc. What made you guys decide to create Democracy Player?

"Democracy Player", 2006, Screenshot
Image courtesy of Participatory Culture Foundation

NR: Well, when we were working on Downhill Battle we were obviously seeing how technology was making it easier to share music and for musicians that were new and didn’t have a big corporate label behind them to really connect with a lot of people. It was really clear that video was where the Internet was going to be headed next....So we were looking at that and saying, this is something that could go in two directions. It could be something that is controlled by corporations, something that becomes locked down and centralized. And a lot of companies are trying to make that happen. They want to create their own wall garden and video that everyone has to use, and make it all for sale, and we felt like, as with the Internet itself, which is based on open standards, and a lot of open source software…we felt like it was really important for someone to come along early in the game that was working in the public interest who was not trying to build something where they were controlling users, where they were deciding who could publish something and who couldn’t, and that someone could come along and really build a system for Internet television, that was really open and accessible and based on the same sorts of open standards that the Internet is.

So if you look at what Democracy Player does, it’s totally agnostic as to where a video is being published. It could be published on someone’s website, it can be published on a clip service like YouTube (editors note: Now dubbed GooTube by Gizmodo after Google’s acquisition of the company), Google Video, or Clip TV, and all of it gets pulled together into one central experience. And anybody that follows that standard, which is an RSS standard, it’s not a new standard that we’re trying to invent or control, and existing open standard, anybody that uses that standard, will be able to have stuff that can be viewed in our player, and we support standards like BitTorrent that make it so you don’t have to spend a lot of money on band width to get your stuff out there (Editors note: Since the time of this interview BitTorrent was bought by The Motion Picture Association of America, which promises that it will no longer be open source as one of it's new services to users. Participatory Culture Foundation supports open source projects.) . And what’s so amazing about BitTorrent is that an individual with a video camera you can even get an HD camera for $1000 dollars now, you can have a single person with a High Definition video camera can be putting out video quality that is just as high resolution as anything that NBC or movie studios could put out and they don’t need to have those deep pockets to pay for bandwidth even though thousands of people want to watch the stuff.

PJ: Right. You know, speaking of image quality, I really like the software design of Democracy Player. It looks so much better than Bloglines, Windows Media Player, better than most of the free downloadable software out there. You also have this video that explains to people who have no familiarity with the medium or how RSS feeds work how to program their vlog viewing for the day, which makes it super easy for anyone who is at all technophobic to get up to speed on the project. I remember being on your site recently and seeing that you had a job listing for a graphic designer. Has that position been filled?

NR: We do still have that listing up on the site. We’ve done contracts with a bunch of different designers, some of the interface stuff I end up doing myself, which is probably not the best idea, but….we’re still kind of looking for the person who is going to be our permanent person…We’ve always felt like design and usability is the most important thing that we need to focus on because it needs to be something that’s usable, it needs to be something that’s a high quality product, that’s mainstream, that people can get into and understand easily. It would be fine if people want to use this because they think it is important and they care about democratizing media, but we know that that’s not going to be the majority of our users and we know that we are competing with companies like Apple, we’re competing with Google, and Windows Media Player, and we need to be at a professional level of quality on something that anybody can use. So the design and interface is something we spend an enormous amount of time on and try to make it as simple as possible, and as usable as possible. The really difficult thing is giving people the power that they want, to be able control the software and do the things they want to do with it and customize it the way they want to use it for the kinds of content they are using but also keeping it really simple and keeping it as close as it can be to sitting down and pressing play and watching TV. I work on that literally every single day. Maybe you know Michael Bell-Smith?

"Channel Guide", 2006, Screenshot
Image courtesy of Participatory Culture Foundation

PJ: Yeah, actually, he’s a New Media artist I interviewed recently on Art Fag City.

NR: We went to school together ….and he’s done graphics here and there for us at times for The Democracy Player. He designed the Channel Guide. And he did a video thing for us a couple of weeks ago for the Channel Channel.

PJ: Interesting! Okay, so going back to the design listing for a moment, you had listed links to a number of the design sites you liked – you had hicksdesign, (they created the Firefox logo), you had garageband (An Apple application for recording, mixing and publishing audio and video)…I can’t remember everybody, else, but at the end of all these people was a link to the artist collective paperrad’s character Tux Dog. And so I wondered if you could talk about that because the connection graphically is pretty thin.The way that I interpreted the reference was that because Tux Dog is basically collaborative drawing, (or for the geeks in the audience open source drawing,) and the work that paperrad makes as a whole is so much about appropriation, that conceptually, the work had a lot of connections to what you were doing –were these some of the connections you were thinking about?

NR:   Yeah, that’s definitely a part of it. It’s also sort of a nod to the other side of our output, which in some ways the aesthetic that we like is the opposite of what we would like to do. You know, we don’t live in clean apartments we don’t drive in fancy cars, we definitely relate to that sort of cultural world that they represent and I think our dream has always been, and we have definitely not found a way to do this visually, but our dream has always been to find a way to be both simultaneously really professional and slick and mainstream, and also acknowledge the punk indi element of that.…It’s really an explanation of our personality more than anything else.

PJ:  Just one other question - you guys run on grants right?

NR:   Yup.

PJ: How are you doing with that?

DV: We’re doing pretty well. We’ve had a few very large donors who have been supporting us from the beginning and have continued to support us, and obviously, fundraising is always a struggle, and always something that we are working on…We’ve found a few individuals who have foundations that are involved in technologies, that understand our project, understand our mission and you know, and we’ve even been able to get a couple of grants from more traditional foundations, um, so we’ve managed to stay alive, and we have at least six months of funding lined up….

Eventually we would like to get to a place where we are bringing in some revenue ourselves and are able to sustain the organization, but obviously our mission comes before that, so we want to see if there are ways to do that. Firefox has found ways to do that really well. They have a deal with Google to be the default search engine, and that little box in the upper right hand corner of your browser - that little box runs their entire organization. They make tens of millions of dollars on that every year, far above what they actually spend, and it’s something that people actually want. Google pays them to be the default, but anybody can switch it to be something else, and most people want it to be Google anyway. I think they made the feature before they even had the deal with Google. They’re able to fund their programs without compromising their mission. That’s something that is unique to being a nonprofit on the Internet -- you can bring in a couple pennies per user, and if you’re reaching millions of users that can fund your whole organization. So essentially we’d like to find a way to do something like that.

Copyleft: Paddy Johnson and Nicolas Reville

Art Fag City: www.artfagcity.blogspot.com
Participatory Culture Foundation: http://participatoryculture.org/
Open Congress: www.opencongress.org

Nicolas Reville, the Co-Founder and Executive Director of The Participatory Culture Foundation, is from Worcester, MA and has a B.A. in Public Policy from Brown University. He worked in a variety of political activism positions for several years before co-founding PCF. The Participatory Culture Foundation is a new non-profit organization based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Their mission is to create tools for broader, deeper engagement with culture and politics. PCF works to ensure that the new mass medium of internet TV is open and independent, just like blogging and podcasting.

Paddy Johnson is the author of the blog Art Fag City, a writer and artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Her writing has been featured in the New York Observer, Flavorpill, FANZINE, and more. She has exhibited at Exit Art, Moving Image Gallery/Rhizome.org, and Creative Time, and has lectured at Yale University and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Paddy recently finished up a stint as an Eyebeam reblogger, and writes a regular column on art film and video for The Reeler.