How to help us document The City From Below

First off, if you already have a way of posting material online, please feel free to keep doing what you do - just let us know where you'll be putting stuff (a url) so we'll be able to link to it.

If you'd rather post into the official conference streams, here's how.

We've got a three-prong strategy for documentation - the first prong involves getting as much material - texts, reactions, photos, videos, and audio up on this site during the conference weekend or immediately afterwards as we can - so we're thinking live blogging from sessions, quick mp3 recordings of sessions , and quick (or even in camera) edits of heavily compressed video.

You can get an account that will allow you to contribute all of these types of media to the pool here on the site by registering for an account. Once you're logged in, you'll see a menu that says "Create content" in the left hand sidebar, and under that, a link that reads City From Below Live Blog Entry. Clicking on that will bring you to a page where you can submit, whether text, images, or other file attachments like audio and video.

For images, please use the field at the top of the page - you can upload 1 image after another, so don't worry that there's just one field to start with. For other kinds of files (audio, video, pdfs, etc.) use the "File Attachments" field at the bottom of the page. IMPORTANT - once you've uploaded the file or image, make sure to hit submit at the bottom of the page, otherwise your changes and uploaded file will be lost.

Video and audio files will get automatically transcoded and embedded in the blog entry page, but please keep the files down to 50MB in size.

What about larger files? Where's the high quality video I can reuse in my own projects? This is the second prong of our documentation strategy. For this, we're going to upload everything we can to archive.org, because they're non-commercial, encourage video producers to upload mpeg2 video so others can reuse commons-licensed material, and have a mission of preserving information for the next few centuries, rather than worrying about marketshare or venture capital. We've got an account on archive.org for the city from below, and if you're interested in helping us get footage off dv and onto the web, we'll be happy to share the account details with you. Or make your own account and post a link here on the blog to the footage. Archive.org maintains a comprehensive FAQ explaining there upload procedures which you should check out.

The third prong of the strategy is a print publication we'll be producing in collaboration with Baltimore's Indypendent Reader. We're hoping to have this done and printed about two months after the conference ends - and ready for national and international distribution. If you'd like to help with the writing, transcription, editing or design work, or you'd like to commit to paying to have a bundle shipped to you for distribution, stop by the documentation table during the weekend, or
shoot us an email at cityfrombelow-newspaper [-at-] redemmas.org.