EngageMedia is participating in the Open Subtitles Design Summit in New York this week.

The two day event, organised by the Participatory Culture Foundation, kicked off today with more than 40 people from a diverse range of organisations - from the hearing impaired to web start ups to media activist organisations, with people coming from across the US, India, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, UK, France and several more locations.

The event is being held in a rather spectacular location, on the 12th floor on a building in SoHo - see photo.

The day started with the ever enjoyable meet and greet activities as run by facilitors Aspiration. Sessions were quite fluidly organised but highly collaborative. Sessions ranged from introductions to html5, legal issues with subtitling/captioning, captioning & search, standards in subtitling/captioning, quality assurance and a host of other breakout sessions including standard tech and user needs, crowd sourcing subtitle contributions, metadata and all manner of other geekiness.

EngageMedia is looking at adding subtitling to the site soon (hopefully early next year), ideally using Universal Subtitles which is looking like an increasingly fantastic system.

Twitter tag: http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23subsummit
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/subsummit/

DAY 1

Anata's tiny laptop on EM-laptop

this is our first day participants. consist of young independent film maker, also two faces from camp Sambel. Anata from ForFilm and Eva from Kiri Depan.

enter Jurnal Celebes' space

Jurnal Celebes' distribution strategy and online/offline tools discussion

solidarity poster in Jurnal Celebes

handbrake session. Aan looks serious in his first experience of Ubuntu

two ladies is in the house!

'the boss needs you, you don't need the boss' - mayday sticker on laptop

yerry explaining online/offline distro

warung kopi with fast internet and a projector :)

brain storming online/offline distro

DAY 5

the screening begin

Unhas participants seriously watch the video

Makassar faces :)

soto ayam for break fast

DAY 6

Imran, Happy and Windah from Rumah Kamu

Imran taking photo while handbrake doing its job

Imran excitedly explained what's on his mind during the workshop

Yerry interviewed Windah

It was a drizzly morning as I entered the side passage into the State Library's conference and meeting room facilities, its hidden facades a brace of hoardings, undergoing yet another face lift.

An attendant asked whether I was here for the Creative Commons Roadshow. He pointed me to a room directly ahead of me. As I walked towards it he had me change direction entirely, leading me into another meeting room that left me some what disorientated and curious as to what all that was about.

I entered as Brian Fitzgerald opened the day with a brief introduction of the agenda and an over view of Creative Commons. Attendance was a lot lower than I had anticipated for a national event. Given we were in the heart of Melbourne's literary and learning culture, the fifty or so persons that braved the drizzle seemed poor evidence of the interest I have known to flourish for Creative Commons in this town, if not much of the cultural centres of the State.

That aside, the day introduced me to projects and advances in the use of CC licenses that were fresh and encouraging. For example, I was very impressed with the extent to which Magnatune have gone to provide a range of licensing options, clearly described, for the music available from it. Not just about CC, but integrating the licenses with a range of uses such as telephone hold music, public space music for retail stores and galleries.

From the various presentations, John Jacob's ABC Pool and Blaise Murphet's PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication, emphasis on the searchability of CC licenses is proving increasingly critical in providing more direct access to content for the use producers and publishers intend.

Another interesting factor in the use of CC was how much it lowered administrative overheads at the ABC. When ever material from The Pool is broadcast the licenses provide so much clarity in terms of the reuse of content, there is less for admin staff to do in terms of ensuring clearance of numerous rights.

CC.au's Elliott Bledsoe's presentation highlighter broader application of the CC API towards more dynamic collation of content from various sources. For instance, I was impressed with content from Flickr can be searched by license and colour. I wondered how such ideas could be applied to EngageMedia, knowing too the difficulty facing researchers and engineers in the search-ability of video.

The entire Roadshow was tweeted with some further insights available at #CCRdShow10. Found someone had quoted me as saying, “I don't want to spend my time responding to [permission] requests, I'd rather play my guitar in the bush.” Thanks @peterneish.

I've been told presentations materials from all CC presenters will be available … as soon as they do, there'll be links galore!

EngageMedia now has a blog. Watch this space, more coming soon.