By Caty Borum Chattoo

Can social-issue documentaries play a role in helping to end global poverty?

Link TV thinks so.

Almost one year ago, the nonprofit global affairs media organization and broadcast network launched a project based on the idea that documentary storytelling, combined with social actions and the latest news, could make a meaningful contribution to the challenge of global poverty. The idea became ViewChange.org, an online portal built on the foundation of semantic Web technology that connects documentary stories to news and social actions in global poverty. In other words, in one place, people can watch character-driven stories, read the latest news about issues covered in the films, and then connect directly to action campaigns around each social issue. It’s a site and tool that’s primed for grassroots awareness and action.

The ViewChange.org platform is now a curated documentary hub with more than 400 short- and long-form character-driven documentaries from around the world – and all of them illustrate real progress toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals, which together comprise the world’s “blueprint” for ending global poverty. The portal site now includes the best stories from top global development organizations and filmmakers around the world.

I work on the project in a kind of hybrid role that combines documentary producing, communication campaign strategy and partnership cultivation with top global development organizations, including Devex, InterAction, Save the Children, UNICEF, PSI, Global Health Council, ONE, Comminit, Bread for the World and more. And thanks to the expertise of these groups, combined with the amazing repository of films now licensed to ViewChange.org, we’ve started producing half-hour TV specials in partnership with several top global development organizations – the ViewChange TV series. For each show, the narrative is informed by the expertise and objectives of the partner organization, and the main story and outreach campaign are developed simultaneously against the backdrop of the group’s organizational (and sometimes advocacy) objectives, creating a powerful campaign-style approach.

But one key to the project is simple and so powerful for those in the social-justice community to organize around specific issues – the fully-sharable/embeddable formatting of the acquired films and the final jointly-produced shows. By giving the videos, films and global development shows to groups and blogs to embed and share for their own purposes, we’re offering a tool that’s useful not only in our own campaign outreach, but for others to use in theirs. Interested in raising attention about the connection between climate change and drought in developing nations? Want to support innovative hunger relief programs in poor areas of the world? Need a documentary story that can be used in your own awareness/activist campaign to organize for purposes of advocacy or other goals? Navigating through the ViewChange.org tool provides all of these opportunities.

Just last week, one of these jointly-produced documentary specials premiered on Link TV (Friday, August 12 and 16) and on ViewChange.org. Working closely with Bread for the World, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, the “ViewChange: Challenging Hunger” documentary special combines filmmaking from Bread for the World itself, along with short films from Oxfam and the Sundance Institute. In this particular show, the organization’s advocacy goals – to use foreign aid more effectively to help poor and hungry people – provide the narrative thru-line.

The call to action is urgent: With more than a billion people suffering from chronic hunger, the timing of potential budget cuts would be particularly devastating to developing nations. And the special debunks a key foreign assistance myth and provides new insight into the ripple effects of chronic hunger: Most Americans believe that about 25 percent of the U.S. budget goes toward foreign assistance, but, in fact, less than 1 percent supports crucial foreign assistance programs—including anti-hunger programs and food aid. The funding is vital to the continued development and management of innovative programs that provide long-term solutions to hunger.

The outreach includes a grassroots campaign to reach out to Bread for the World’s network of thousands of individual members, churches and denominations around the country, as well as reaching out through its college-age hunger activists group. Teams at both Link TV and Bread for the World are working jointly in an integrated strategic communication campaign model that includes traditional media outreach, blogging, sharing the show via embeddable links, outreach to top global development influencers, and social media.

To support Bread for the World’s work directly, check out its fact sheets and advocacy opportunities on its site: Tell Congress to create a circle of protection around funding for programs that are vital to hungry and poor people in the US and abroad.

Follow ViewChange on Twitter @ViewChange and at Facebook.com/ViewChange.

You can watch and share the full show here: ViewChange: Challenging Hunger.

Link TV Platform is being released as a Rails Engine for the popular Ruby on Rails web application framework. Essentially an application within an application, this modular approach provides a robust foundation, while allowing for your own customizations and enhancements.

We are also releasing Link TV Player, a Flash video player, as a separate open source project. The player supports both streaming (RTMP) and progressive download (HTTP) video sources, as well as YouTube content, and can be used in conjunction with Link TV Platform, or as a standalone player.

Both of these projects are in use on ViewChange.org, as well as the recently launched Link TV News site. However, we recognize that they are neither complete nor perfect. We are actively working on improvements, optimizations, tests and documentation. In releasing these projects as open source software, our hope is to foster collaboration and encourage community involvement in improving the projects. We look forward to your feedback, and are excited to see how these projects grow and evolve.

Why Open Source?

ViewChange.org was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the goal of enabling organizations and individuals to create change. In making these projects freely available, we hope to empower others to create and promote change in new and different ways.

Many open source packages, libraries, frameworks and servers have been utilized in creating these projects. Without the open nature of projects like Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Apache Solr, as well as the myriad plugins and gems contributed by individuals and organizations, this project would not have been possible. With this release, we are happy to have the opportunity to contribute back to the open source community.

Platform Features

• Flexible video support
  Import videos from MRSS feeds to Amazon S3, streaming support via Amazon CloudFront, YouTube content and HTML5 video playback
• Content analysis & curation
  Create distinct video segments (chapters), assign suggested topics from video transcript text analysis (via Zemanta API) and weight topic associations by relevance.
• Semantic Web features
  Linked Data URIs, contextual RDFa markup with owl:sameAs links to Freebase and DBpedia entities, RDF/XML endpoints.
• Related content discovery
  Aggregate related articles, videos and actions from around the web, leveraging APIs from Daylife, Zemanta, Truveo and Social Actions.
• Advanced search & API
  Fulltext search powered by Apache Solr and an available JSON/XML API.

License

We have chosen to release both projects under the MIT License, due to the flexibility it affords and its refreshing lack of bureaucracy. A few GPL-licensed components are utilized within the platform, though they have been excluded from the distribution due to the restrictions of the GPL. Further details are available in the project documentation.

To achieve this, ViewChange.org by Link TV, a non-profit committed to improving the world with storytelling, utilizes semantic analysis … Top-level categories are decided upon (or “bootstrapped”) by curators, however, while navigating the site users are presented with automated recommendations as well.

Read the full post here

From yesterday’s announcement:

The updates introduce Semantic Analysis and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to the Social Actions API and begin to connect Social Actions to the wider Linked Open Data community.
….
Link TV, in prototyping their ViewChange platform, noticed that the Social Actions API wasn’t producing the best possible results. They invited us to explore with them what would be involved in updating our platform so that ViewChange could feature more relevant results.
Link TV, along with Doug Puchalski and Rob DiCiuccio of Definition, helped us articulate the changes that would need to occur and then connected us with a funder who could underwrite what amounted to a very significant enhancement to our code base. In one month, we had approximately as large an investment in the technology as we’d had in total up until that point.
….
The Social Actions API now cross-references issues and locations with universal identifiers that have been assigned to them. Just like you might cross-reference the subject of a book with a Dewey Decimal number, we are now cross-referencing each action with a universal identifier that helps to link it to related data. Using Zemanta, we are able to provide URIs (Uniform Resource Identifier) from Freebase and DBPedia that make the connection between actions in our system and other material on the web that relates to the same topic.

The ability to query using Linked Data URIs (e.g. http://dbpedia.org/resource/John_Adams) removes the ambiguity inherent with a traditional keyword query (“John Adams”), which could be interpreted as any number of persons, such as the former U.S. President or the composer.

We hope that, through this enhanced integration between Social Actions and ViewChange.org, we are able to help you get involved by bringing you relevant, timely actions, so you can make a difference.

Read the entire interview with Peter Dietz from Social Actions.

On the technology side, ViewChange.org uses the semantic blogging API Zemanta to analyze time-based video transcripts and create smart topics (semantic entities) to categorize the videos. These topics are then connected with matching Freebase and DBpedia entities, and are used to make finding videos on the site easier. They’re also employed in a live search using the Daylife, Truveo and SocialActions APIs to find related videos, articles, and ways to take action from around the Web. This related content appears alongside the chapter of the video it’s most relevant to. For a nice practical look at how this works, here’s a great blog post by a health professional. For a more in-depth look at the technology, read On Linked Data and ViewChange.org, posted by ViewChange technical lead, Rob DiCiuccio of Definition. You can also check out our technology press release, which provides a great look at the tools we’ve created.

“Vital Voices: Kakenya” in the advanced embeddable player

On the content side, Link TV’s acquisitions team has spent the last year seeking out videos from distributors, organizations, and filmmakers, about people working on the ground to spark real progress in the developing world. In the summer we held the ViewChange Online Film Contest, with judges including Wim Wenders, Danny Glover, and Gael Garcia Bernal. The contest garnered 137 successful entries detailing projects in 49 different countries. Almost 30,000 votes were cast in 2 weeks to help decide the finalists. Winners will be announced at 3pm PST here.

So far there are almost 250 videos on ViewChange.org, but we expect to add several hundred more to the collection by the end of the year. Almost all the videos are downloadable and embeddable.

So please, take a minute, or an hour, to check out ViewChange.org!

The Web of text

HTML, XML, RDF, JavaScript, CSS. The foundation of the Web is text-based. While online video is becoming increasingly popular, and now accounts for a large percentage of Internet traffic, video is still somewhat a second-class citizen on the Web. This is beginning to change, as new open video standards emerge, but as it stands, we have to transcribe the video in order to process its content. Once we have text transcriptions of the videos, we are able to operate on a level playing field. Video transcripts are analyzed using Entity Extraction tools, and topics (disambiguated Named Entities) extracted from the raw text. The resulting topics are linked to online databases such as Freebase and DBpedia, which provide the connection to the LOD cloud.

Metadata & accessibility

ViewChange.org exposes semantic metadata in a number of ways. RDFa markup is used throughout the site to identify resources and the relationships between them. Popular ontologies, such as Dublin Core, FOAF, and Facebook’s Open Graph protocol, are used to provide standard, interoperable metadata, and enhanced accessibility. Topic and video pages also provide RDF/XML representations, for efficient machine processing.

Linked Data concepts

ViewChange addresses the the four concepts of Linked Data, outlined by Tim Berners-Lee, as follows:

1. Use URIs as names for things

All topic and video resources on ViewChange.org have unique permalink URIs, which serve as strong identifiers.

2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.

Topic and video pages are accessible via HTTP, naturally.

3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF*, SPARQL)

When a video or topic URI is dereferenced, structured data is returned using either XHTML+RDFa or RDF/XML.

Examples:
http://www.viewchange.org/topics/united-nations
http://www.viewchange.org/topics/united-nations.rdf
http://www.viewchange.org/videos/the-last-kankan-of-nakhchivan
http://www.viewchange.org/videos/the-last-kankan-of-nakhchivan.rdf

4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

ViewChange.org topics are semantically linked to entities in databases such as Freebase and DBpedia (using owl:sameAs), while videos expose links to a wide range of related content.

Feedback welcome

Much like the Semantic Web itself, the Linked Data implementation in ViewChange.org is a work in progress. We are very interested in feedback from the community, so please let us know if there’s something we could be doing better.

The announcement will be made at a TEDxLondon event by contest judge Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It’s part of a whole day of TEDx events, starting off with TEDxChange in New York, an event dedicated to the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Millennium Development Goals, featuring Melinda French Gates, TED curator (not to mention author and Wired editor-in-chief) Chris Anderson and TED star Hans Rosling.

The New York event will be followed by TEDxLondon, which will focus on ViewChange.

Both events will be streamed live at linktv.org/viewchange/tedxchange, starting at 3PM GMT/11AM EDT/8AM PDT. The announcement itself is expected to take place at around 6:50PM GMT.

Monday itself is going to be a packed day for us! We’re going to start in the morning with a live stream of TEDxChange: The Future We Make, a “chance to reflect on the Millennium Development Goals ten years in, and to look forward to where we’ll be.” Speakers include Melinda French Gates, Graça Machel, Hans Rosling, Mechai Viravaidya, and Bajah + The Dry Eye Crew.

This will be followed by a TEDxLondon event featuring a lineup of speakers that includes film contest judge and novelist Chimamanda Adichie announcing the contest finalists.

The day of live streaming will start at 8am PDT. More details and a link coming shortly.

In other news, I was recently asked to reflect on our experiences with online film contests for website SF360.org. This article looks at contests from the filmmaker perspective: Online Film Contests: Friend or Foe?

In late June, we presented at SemTech in San Francisco, the self-professed “world’s largest, most authoritative conference on semantic technology.”  If you’re in to triple stores, SPARQL queries, and W3C working groups, SemTech is the conference for you. For us, there was the chance to tell people about ViewChange.org, catch up with partners, and crash some of the less techie panels.

In what was a largely controversy-free (and thus Twitter-lite) conference, Andraz Tori from the semantic blogging plug-in/API/wizardry tool Zemanta sparked some debate with his presentation, “User Interfaces for Semantic Web: Do They Have to Be Ugly?” Happily, as a ViewChange.org partner, Andraz had early access to our site and included some slides of it as an example of good design. He argued that a major factor in the success of semantic interfaces, including the BBC’s Nature site, is that they keep the semantic part to themselves. The user experience and design are just improved by the features and SEO bump that come with linking content semantically, but the ordinary person wouldn’t necessarily notice the change. Instead, their experience would be more along the lines of, oh, this looks nice, and now I can find everything I’m interested in (and possibly even some things they didn’t know they were interested in).

Away from SemTech, this point was reinforced when we recently met with John Domingue from the Open University in the UK. On top of giving us an amazing overview of EU funding for semantic research, he mentioned that the BBC had just had similar success with its World Cup site. If you haven’t read up on that yet, the BBC developed its own ontology to fuel “automated metadata-driven web pages” created on the fly. According to Domingue, the experiment was a great success, and when added to Nature and the BBC’s Music site, represents the biggest stable of successful semantic sites whose semantic-ness under the hood hasn’t altered their user-centric design choices.

(A word of warning to anyone who is both using the Zemanta API and touring around demoing their semantic website: using Zemanta’s blogging demo as a tool to explain what the terms “Semantic Web” and “Linked Data” mean will work really, really well. Too well. It may upstage your own presentation.)

Back at SemTech, on top of presenting a talk on “Semantic Web Tools for Video and Social Change,” we also took part in a publishers panel that brought together OpenCalais and Phase2 Technology. Phase2 is the web development firm behind OpenPublish, the Drupal-based online semantic publishing package powered by OpenCalais and used by The Nation and The New Republic, among others (Phase2 also built a little site called Whitehouse.gov). It was great to be invited onto the panel by OpenCalais. Tom Tague from OpenCalais echoed Andraz’s presentation, calling on new semantic sites to think of the user experience first and foremost. Tech talk was shunned in favor of conversation about real world examples of working sites and applications, including a lengthy profile of ViewChange.org. The biggest revelations seemed to come from Phase2 CEO Jeff Walpole when describing the improved SEO experienced by publishers who have regeared their sites using OpenPublish.

ViewChange.org won’t be publicly available until the fall, but the beta version of our next-generation multimedia website is already fully functional. The very best global development video content is presented alongside relevant news links and ways to take action, thanks to cutting-edge search tools that scour the web for the most up-to-date material. Many more films will be added to the site in the days and weeks ahead.

As you explore ViewChange.org, please remember that this service is still in beta, so you may come across the occasional bug or glitch. If you do, or if you have any comments, drop us a line using the “Feedback” tab located on the edge of every page on the site. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on our new video platform.