Wired’s Threat Level brings word of an ambitious new nonprofit organization. Remix America is headed by Emmy Award-winning comedy television writer Fred Graver, and was co-founded with Norman Lear.
Their goal is to use mashups to engage an online audience in political ideas and expression. And, through a licensing arrangement with Kaltura for an online video editing tool, they provide the means to do it:
“I thought to myself: Gee, there’s a whole culture out there, but nowhere for them to go except YouTube, it’s all a bit amorphous,” Graver says.
Wouldn’t it be cool too, both he and Lear thought, if the remixers’ multimedia opinions could be put in the context of the big ideas that have driven American political trends and history?
To that end, Remix America has uploaded hundreds of hours worth of archival footage of landmark political speeches and moments in American history. That footage is accessible on the site under “The American Playlist,” which Graver says contains “200 plus expressions of the “Great American Ideals — everything from the Declaration of Independence to readings of the Gettysburg Address, speeches from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and video after the 1950s.”
The Threat Level Challenge:
Threat Level challenges you to share your 2008 presidential campaign perspective as expressed through a mashup, using the online editing tool provided by Remix America. The site’s managers have uploaded hours and hours of convention footage, but they’ve also enabled users to upload footage from other sources. Graver has created an online video tutorial that gives you a quickie tour of the site’s functionality. And here’s the site’s Terms of Service (if you were wondering.) All content uploaded to the site is automatically licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Threat Level has created a Reddit widget that enables you to submit your mashups and to vote on each others’ submissions. Check it out!