Just over a year ago NewAssignment.Net interviewed the founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation about their open source media player Democracy. Recently I had a chance encounter with Nicholas Reville and thought it would be a good opportunity to find out what has happened in the last year. For starters, the OS media player called Democracy is now known as Miro. Google may have YouTube, but nobody should have a monopoly with online video. As a result, Miro, the open source video player is an excellent alternative. Let’s begin.

Q: What has happened in the last year in terms of growth?

Nicholas Reville: In the last year, we’ve gone from being a beta project with a relatively small user base to being a mainstream application. We’ve had almost 2 million downloads this year and we expect to have at least 5 times that next year. The 1.0 release in November really
brought us to a new level.

Q: Have you found new uses for the player that you didn’t expect when you initially launched? Another angle to that question, What have been some unexpected lessons?

A: We’ve been getting many, many requests for custom versions of the Miro— not something we planned to do. Lots of sites want to be able to distribute a desktop app that comes with all their own content. Due to popular demand we’ve launched a ‘Co-Branded Miro’ service that will give them just that. It lets us reach all their users with a truly open distribution tool. You’ll see the first co-branded players launching before the end of the year.

Q: What have been some highs and lows. I see you changed the name from Democracy to Miro — why, and how has that change been?

A: The name change was a very difficult decision, but I think a good one. What worked well about the name Democracy was that it strongly communicated our mission— how we’re different than for-profit competitors. But it simply confused too many people. Lots of potential users thought the application was just about political videos and of course that limited our ability to reach new people. The name change seems to have brought a whole bunch of new folks to the player and we’ve made an extra effort to communicate our mission throughout the site so that that message doesn’t get lost.

Q: In our last interview we talked a lot about volunteers. As an open source project you obviously rely on them. How do you keep them motivated? What community aspects, if any, do you implement to keep people coming back?

A: We have a number of ways to keep volunteers involved, but the key to all of them is transparency and collaboration. For testing volunteers, we have a testing blog that Janet (our QA director) runs. It updates people on testing progress and highlights new features. This helps testers understand the impact they are having and follow the development more closely. Dean spends a lot of his time working with volunteers to maintain the Miro Guide, get feedback about what would make their work easier, and he holds a weekly volunteer chat in
our IRC channel every Tuesday at 5:30pm EST. What’s great about a truly participatory project is that the volunteers are motivated to find ways to get more volunteers involved. It’s not a top down approach.

Q: A year ago you mentioned that you use Basecamp as a tool to work collaboratively online. Is that still the case? If so exactly how do you use it? Can you give us a recent example? If you use new tools — what are they?

A: We don’t use Basecamp as much as we used to, though it still comes in handy for shared to-do lists, and our business development director is a big fan of Highrise. We’ve recently switch our bug tracking software from Trac to Bugzilla, which has made our developers much happier (we still use trac for the development wiki). Google
Analytics helps us track our website usage and we use Awstats to track downloads. And I check Technorati.com every day to see who’s blogging about us. But most of all, we use email, IM, and IRC to have a continuous dialog among ourselves. Despite the frustrations and limitations, email seems to be the backbone of nearly everything.

Q: With the YouTube/CNN debates earlier this year - video, especially citizen created media is entering the center stage of the larger media landscape. Why is it so important that an open player like Miro be widely available?

A: YouTube recently canceled the account of a key Egyptian activist who was posting anti-torture videos. Banned from YouTube, he loses access to the biggest online video audience in the world— that consolidation
is already creating problems for free speech. If open aggregators like Miro can become the centerpiece for online video, then the users are at the center, not the hosting company. Activists and everyone else can publish anywhere (such as places that are more supportive of free speech or that offer higher quality video than YouTube) and users can bring it all together in a unified experience. You simply do not want a single company or even a handful of companies in a gatekeeper
role.

Q: What is next for Miro? More importantly - what do you need to achieve those goals?

A: We’re focused on making the application better— faster, easier, more powerful. We’re about to release Miro 1.1 which will dramatically improve BitTorrent performance. A bigger revision coming after that will have some big under the hood changes for speed and will have a shiny new interface. To get it done, what we need most now is more programmers and full-time programmers cost money. Building desktop software is very complicated, especially when it’s on Mac, Windows, and Linux. We hope to grow gradually over the course of 2008.