It’s gotten to the point where we don’t really need to encourage people to stop by the VCAM/RETN studios for Art Hop anymore. We’re pretty slammed with folks all night long on the Friday of Art Hop, and we get a good number of folks through the door on Saturday too. Still, if you’re wondering where to start your hop, the 208 Flynn complex is loaded with art, performances, food and drink. The Flynndog Art Gallery, Outer Space Cafe, Select Design, Propeller Media Works, VCAM and RETN will all be hosting what has become the biggest party of the year in this end of town.

Here in VCAM we’ll have art from more than a dozen artists in many different media, great food (we’ve gotten a reputation for good food at Art Hop) and DJ Disco Phantom will be spinning in our studio.

If you’ve never been to VCAM for Art Hop, it’s worth stopping by. Look for the big lights on the roof!

Tired of waiting for all of the legal and financial issues that are involved with starting a local public access center to get resolved, some Portsmouth, NH citizens took it upon themselves to get the ball rolling online. According to wirenh.com, an online livestream channel was created over beers one evening.

Freund described his vision for an online media venue that would enable him and others to “shine a light on the interesting people from the community, the people that were making a difference, the people that stand out,” Freund said.

As he described the project, Herman buried his face in his laptop and began typing. At first, Freund thought Herman was ignoring him. But soon enough, Herman spun around the screen and displayed what he had created.

“By the end of him describing it, I had made it,” Herman said

What he made was a live community channel on the streaming Internet television platform Livestream. The site is now up at www.shortstream.tv. Freund and Herman view it as the public access channel Portsmouth has been trying in vain to create for the last several years.

Portsmouth has a governmental access channel but public and educational channels have been languishing in start-up limbo for some time. This online venue was a quick, easy and inexpensive way to get things going.

The wirenh.com article doesn’t mention it, but while this is a great way to bypass the hurdles involved in franchise agreements and non-profit start-up paperwork and the expense of starting an actual public access center, it’s important to note that this is not an adequate replacement of such a place. Public access cable channels reach a much more specific and diverse segment of the community than websites can due to the ubiquity of cable TV relative to broadband internet in households. Even in households with both cable and broadband, the cable TV menu of available options is at best a few hundred channels, even with the most robust digital cable service. By comparison, finding locally relevant community media online is much harder, even when an outlet like shortstream.tv exists.

Perhaps more importantly, a community media center is a physical location in the community for citizens to meet and collaborate and learn. Training and equipment are available there, and a knowledgeable staff is invaluable in growing a culture of local media-makers.

It’s fantastic that these Portsmouth citizens took it upon themselves to get the ball rolling, but it would be a shame if an unintended consequence of their efforts was the actual public access channel getting delayed further because of a sense that the community’s public access needs were already being met with the website. They aren’t.

Swiped from an idea by west coast videobloggers Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan, New Media Office Hours is an attempt to bring new-media pros together somewhere out in the world (away from their monitor-lit caves) and get them to interact with members of the public who have questions about filmmaking, videography, digital editing, A/V compression settings, copyright issues, content management systems, how to get good audio, compositing, or anything else that’s even vaguely related to digital A/V media.

In an email, Casey McKinnon described NMOH this way…

New Media Office Hours [is] a way to reach out to new media creators and help answer questions, build the community and work through problems (technical, business, creative, whatever).  In a way, it’s similar to combining the Yahoo Videoblogging Group with the old Apple Store “Meet the Vlogger” events.

It’s especially about building the community. We want content creators of all sorts to come together and network and learn from each other and even to collaborate. If you’re a filmmaker or blogger or radio DJ or podcaster or TV producer — if you produce and/or distribute A/V content of any kind in any medium, this meet-up is for you. No experience necessary — this event is completely n00b-friendly.

So we’d like to officially announce that the first New Media Office Hours (east-coast) gathering will be this coming Monday evening at The Sapa coffeehouse in downtown Burlington at 5:00 P.M. A small group of new-media pros and arm-chair enthusiasts will be on hand to chat with anyone who stops by about whatever is on their mind (related to new-media, that is).

So stop on by on Monday, have some coffee or tea, and talk shop with some new-media folks! Hope to see you there!

BHS teen filmmaker Graham Raubvogel has written and directed a short film for the high school filmmaking club that met at VCAM on Fridays during the last school year. We shot the film at VCAM with a cast and crew made up of professional filmmakers and film club students, resulting an a veritable master class in filmmaking. Eat your heart out, Maine Workshops!

Art Lovers from Graham Raubvogel on Vimeo.

If you click through to Vimeo you can watch the film in HD.

This was the live stream from the conference “Thought And Expression In A Changing World” hosted by The American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont. The conference took place on Mon. June 29th at the Windjammer Conference Center in South Burlington and was attended by attorneys, policy-makers, private citizens and educators. Visit The ACLU of VT’s website for more information.

Thank you to all who attended the conference and to those who joined us via the live stream.

After the final day of the Open Video conference, Rob talks about what we learned, who we saw, and where we are planning to go.

VCAM attended the first ever Open Video conference last weekend in New York City, where we learned a lot about advancements in the area of net neutrality, open source media on the web, and the movement to standardize international communication using video created by… well, you… Rob Chapman, E.D., talks briefly about what we’ve seen and why we’re here.