Thanks to Chris Haller, Director of eParticipation for sending the link.
The concept behind iCommunity.TV originated in a twofold observation: Despite an almost ubiquitous availability of online mapping applications and websites with geo-enabled functionality, no video-sharing website offers the ability to geographically locate content. Secondly, video-sharing is still mostly focused on entertainment and the few video blogs that exist, mainly serve interest groups independent of location.
We believe that people choose the cities and towns they live in not only based on physical but also emotional reasons — the unique heart and soul characteristics of places. Local events, like school events, last week’s hail storm, or an interview with the mayor about the efforts to revitalize downtown, are important events that generate local identity for citizens, but, particularly for small communities or neighborhoods, there are few venues through which these news items are delivered. This means that local news, especially carried over visual channels, has great potential to support and encourage vibrant communities.
Our effort is focused on developing an aggregation platform that ties into video-sharing platforms like Youtube.com, extends their services by letting anyone georeference and sort video clips in news categories, and offers multiple convenient ways to subscribe to and watch these custom channels (e.g. “Politics in Berlin, Germany”).
