Zero influence

Datama is a project that I set up to explore the relationship between open media and open source software. It’s become clear with rise of online community projects that aggregators are beginning to spring up and offer the user new ways to use their and other community members data in interesting ways.

For me, the through-put of data has 2 obsticles:-

1. The licence of the media has to be open enough so that anyone can reuse it as they see fit.

2. The software that supports these activities too must be open and free enough to enable the re-purposing of the relationship between ‘content’ and ’software’.

All media files on the internet are just data; video, images, text, audio are all made up from data. How this data can be played with is still very much an open question based upon the 2 points above. Also, being data, the ability to hybridise the media to create new content is relatively untouched by media operators and software developers.

Datama addresses these 2 issues by looking to open source development communities for the construction of the software and working within the current legal frame work for the consumption if media.

The diagram below illustates the mechaniscs of the visioned software.

How the project will develop is unknown at the moment. There are no sponsors, not staff, no real community, yet.

If you’re interested in where it might go, visit the project’s site: www.data.ma

All the related datama post on this blog are here.