Cochabamba to Cancun: Maximizing Global Participation

The CMPCC forum in Cochambamba in April 2010 was a tremendous leap forward in mobilizing a global movement around climate change and the rights of Mother Earth.

The COP 16 in Cancun from November 29 - December 10 2010 represents the next step in the mobilization effort.

The Cochabamba tech team made significant progress in involving people from around the world by providing live video and audio streams of the major events and an easily navigable web site pulling in thousands of articles, recordings and images of the event. Despite the high web site traffic numbers during Cochabamba, however, we still only reached a tiny fraction of the people who want to participate in this movement and whose involvement is critical to our success.

The untapped potential in Cochabamba included:

1. Most tech and video organizing happened onsite, limiting our capacity to the technologists able to travel to Cochabamba.
2. Many of the participants had web cams built into their laptops or smart phones with video cameras, yet only a tiny fraction were mobilized to use them for the bigger media campaign
3. Not enough people who are video taping activities are following through to upload their videos to any site, much less a centralized site.
4. Not enough people are notified about the video schedule with enough advance notice to organize screenings or otherwise plan to watch

In addition to this untapped potential, we expect new opportunities in Cancun that were not available in Cochamba:

1. More protest/demostration oriented events instead of forums. These events, when provided via a live video stream, can make a significantly more emotional impact than when viewed on demand
2. Simultaneous actions in other cities. Based on initial organizing events, we expect to see major demonstrations in other locations, providing an opportunity for us to display, live, events happening in concert from around the world.
3. A global movement more organized now thanks to the Cochabamba event

With increasing participation in the convergences world-wide (and their increasing number) and the broadening participation from so many countries, we need to broaden and improve the number of both video creators as well as video consumers.

Proposal

We propose organizing an international campaign to capture video related to Cochabamba2Cancun during the period of the COP16 conference that will provide a means for displaying simultaneous live video feeds from cities all around the globe, involving thousands of activists and technologists united in support of the Cochabamba accords. The objectives of the campaign will include not only multiple live video streams, but full archiving of all contributed video, and a means for easily finding and playing video on demand.

In this system:

Anyone can feed video into the live stream. The site would be capable of taking and display various streams at once and the viewer can choose which stream he or she is watching. A producer will select the stream that is the "default" at the moment.

In this way, we can stream demonstrations throughout the world in support of the Cancun actions: live and simultaneously.

At the same time, all video streamed will be archived.

Those archives will join other material in the archives section of the site: directly uploaded video, links to video on other sites, rss feeds of videos stored elsewhere. This would make this the most comprehensive video storage and display system we have ever done.

Plan

1. Develop a live, web-based, video switching web site that will serve as a central collaboration hub for incoming video
2. Create extensive documentation, including both written and video, explaining how anyone can use their existing video equipment (Laptop or smart phone) to send video over the Internet to the collaboration server.
3. Organize a recruitment, orientation and training campaign to develop video teams in strategic locations
4. Carryout an extensive public relations campaign to advertise the site and schedule of vide
5. Coordinate a team of producers/managers to make the decisions about the site and content.