1. General FAQ (below)
2. Contributors FAQ
3. Users FAQ
4. Legal FAQ
5. Technical FAQ
6. Miscellaneous FAQ

1. General FAQ

What is Ourmedia about?

We're a community of video producers, podcasters and other grassroots media makers coming together to show off citizen creativity, discuss methods for creating higher-quality works, and interact with one another.

We want to advance creative culture and the Commons. See our Mission statement for how we're different from YouTube and other video hosting sites.

Who is behind Ourmedia?

Videobloggers, podcasters, members of the creative community, technologists, educators and others interested in spreading digital culture are behind Ourmedia. Leading the effort are J.D. Lasica, author of "Darknet" and an evangelist for participatory media, and Markus Sandy, a videoblogger and developer with Outhink Media. (Marc Canter, a technologist and open standards advocate who co-founded the site, has not been with Ourmedia since August 2005.)

Ourmedia is an open-source effort.

What kind of media belongs on Ourmedia?

Almost any kind of digital media. Ourmedia consists of video (blog video, music videos, television-style reports, documentaries, underground films, grassroots political ads, animation, machinima), audio (interviews with authors, oral family histories, readings of properly licensed book chapters), original music, photographs, ebooks and more. You decide what goes up on the site.

Who's paying the tab?

Outhink Media, a social media company in San Francisco, began supporting development of Ourmedia in early 2007. Ourmedia runs on Drupal, a free open-source content management platform.

Most of the costs of storage and bandwidth are borne by our hosting partners: the Internet Archive and Blip.tv.

How long will my materials be stored? Did you say forever?

If you use Ourmedia to publish your files to the Internet Archive, which has been archiving nearly everything on the open Web since 1996, archive founder Brewster Kahle has pledged to preserve these materials for generations to come.

Whoa! That means my grandkids could see the stuff I'm publishing today.

That's right. So keep that in mind.

What does it cost?

It's free. Actually, it's better than free — it will save you bandwidth and storage fees. 

Updated April 2007

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