Site back up

The Ourmedia.org website was down for the past two days. The site crashed after a corruption in one of the tables. Our programmers worked nonstop on the problem and finally restored the site, and are now ironing out the remaining issues.

Thanks for your emails of support, and thanks for your patience!

— JD

Ourmedia: phase 2

When Ourmedia’s servers went down the other day, someone came up with a great idea: Create an offsite blog that lets people know about the latest doings at Ourmedia, so if the site ever goes down, we’ll be able to update our community.

So, here’s where you can find out more about Ourmedia’s efforts.

We owe our members our deepfelt appreciation for sticking with us during a difficult period since last fall. To recap:

• Ourmedia is an all-volunteer open media/open source project that is close to obtaining 501c3 nonprofit status. We don’t get paid to operate the site.

• We see Ourmedia as occupying a different space than the YouTubes of the world and its clones. We laid out a set of principles that underscored these differences — we’re here for the community, we want to put artists and creators at the center of a true community experience, we want to provide tools and educational materials to help our members create better media, we support remix culture, etc.

• Remember, all our members are part of making this site a success. We need sys admins, db admins and developers with drupal skills, more moderators, curators, etc. Want to help out? Let us know.

• We’re in the process of creating a development environment in which coders can help create a distributed network of open media content and tools to use on their own community sites, college campuses, or wherever they’d like.

• One of our most important new initiatives is the Personal Media Learning Center, a new resource that aspires to help the public learn all about videoblogging, podcasting, digital storytelling, digital photography and other forms of user-created media.

Please volunteer to help out the cause.