The Diversity Launchpad is a cooperative effort of BAVC and New York City’s Arts Engine to assure that the past and present work of youth media entities and youth media makers be accessible into the future. The initial focus is on the development of metadata standards, the physical process of acquiring, preserving and digitizing content into an archive and architecting open, yet secure, archives for wide use.

We are thrilled about our partnership with Arts Engine because of their terrific work through the Media That Matters festival, the leadership they have shown by starting to create an archive of media content through their Youth Media Distribution Network (YMDI) many years ago, and their expertise in media rights. Not to mention that Arts Engine is a collective of talented, passionate and smart folks.

Our current work (as of late 2009), funded by the Surdna Foundation, includes developing meta data standards that will enable the distribution and access of youth media content via online search, and assure its inclusion in the broader public media archival developments. This push feels timely as public broadcasting formally launched its American Archive effort to bring forward past media assets from across its member broadcast stations towards a shared archive in the cloud for future use. That launch was roughly two years ago. And, unfortunately, progress has been slow.

In other postings, I’ll go further into what other efforts besides the Diversity Launchpad emerged in the course of conversations about media archives, standards and networks. We’ve been busy in this space. 

Why BAVC and the Diversity Launchpad? And how did we get here from our initial idea about content creation?

BAVC has been engaged in youth media training since 1998, having trained thousands of youth over the years and slowly growing the scale of our work to accommodate both the artistic and career development of youth. We have been fortunate to hire program alum as staff, serve as the model for many developing programs, and provide both daily curriculum for programs via the web and professional training for teachers here in our facilities.

As PB Core 1.0 launched (the metadata scheme for public broadcasting), there was not a single tag for “Youth” in any phrase or form. The closest metadata tag was “children” which clearly was a nod to PBS Kids content but certainly doesn’t apply to teens. In fact, while we could find a tag for “horse,” few if any tags reflected any phrasing or range of terms that act as descriptors for diversity. Metadata standards are not simple constructions, but it is imperative that early in any large-scale effort to advance a standard taxonomy that a range of assets, audiences and creatives be accommodated. Interoperability or more accurately, inter-searchability, across archival collections depends on it.

We are happy to report that we’ve been engaged by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to help think through PB Core to put a name to the gaps in their system as they develop version 2.0. We had our first call with their consultants, Digital Dawn, on March 2, 2010. We’ll continue to share back what happens.

The origins of the idea . . .

In 2007, BAVC made a concerted effort to focus on the lack of diversity in public broadcasting and reached out to PBS to discuss ways they could begin to build media assets for youth as well as organize the youth media making community. Originally called "The Millenial Producers Network," BAVC at that tie proposed an initiative to develop, produce, and incubate multi-platform public media projects for millennial audiences. Recognizing a growing “content gap” in the public media sphere—the diverse underserved audiences between Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theater—BAVC sought to develop and promote content that is relevant to millennials and accessible through the platforms and devices that these audiences use to access media and to participate in their schools and communities. The first sketch developed in Feb 2007 looked like this:



 Millenial Producers Network (398.78 kB)

In reflecting back over three years, it is missing so much . . . like licensing experts, gaming, targeted mediamakers, etc. Several of the groups listed are no longer operating. Time and distance, of course, brings perspective, but we followed quickly from this concept that refers to infrastructure to a concept focused on delivery.

In every meeting with PBS, which included everyone from the Executive level to the Interactive and Education teams, we were met with positives. Moving the concept from concept to funding, however, remains elusive. This is a space we’re not willing to give up on yet. In many ways, the Diversity Launchpad is our current effort to sustain the ultimate vision of a content-generating community that is resourced and in partnership with public broadcasting. Of course, young people and nonprofits supporting youth will continue to produce with or without PBS, NPR or CPB. The stubborn inclusion of public broadcasting, however, has to do with the longer strategy of spectrum, public dollars and converting “trust.”

In 2008, BAVC launched its internal use of Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP) Server, an off-the-shelf media asset management solution, to both serve our internal archival needs and to develop some custom solutions for the field. After a series of starts and stops, we managed to move thousands of internal titles to FCP Server only to have our network suffer a catastrophic fail. After that experience, we realized that it isn't useful for us to become experts in server management and network configuration. It is more cost effective and makes more sense to leave that to companies whose sole expertise is server management. So while we continue to utilize FCP Server as a cost effective and well-developed system, and have even created a custom solution for KQED, we’re moving towards cloud solutions.



ITVS Presentation

Here’s a visual of some of the functionality we proposed building for ITVS. They opted for a system that was built around their legacy Filemaker interface. I pulled a few slides out of our presentation to them because it provides a decent summary of what functions are important to consider when constructing a digital asset management (DAM) system.

How the idea impacted other programming within BAVC . . .

BAVC is currently developing an open-source, secure media network to enable the sharing of assets among members of the Dance Heritage Coalition. The beta site can be viewed here though it is currently not open for public exploration.



The work is a small-scale version of what the American Archive is attempting to do and is a custom open-source solution that borrows from our experience with Apple’s proprietary FCP Server.

So, what started with a simple question, "What if we created and archived content specifically for the millenial generation?" turned into a lot of learning yielded an actual multi-year project for BAVC. 

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