As many of you know, Wikimedia is working with Kaltura, Inc. to explore collaborative video editing in the Wikimedia projects. I'm very happy to announce that Kaltura has decided to support the further development of a 100% open source video editing solution integrated into MediaWiki. To this end, Kaltura is sponsoring Michael Dale, lead developer of the MetaVid project, to work in the Wikimedia Foundation offices in San Francisco beginning in early August.
Michael will work on adding support for video editing operations and other video-related functionality to MediaWiki, with a rich user interface built entirely on open standards like Ogg Theora. Michael's work priorities will be coordinated between Kaltura and WMF. I am hoping that we can make incremental improvements to Wikimedia's video capabilities that will start to become visible to users soon. :-)
Michael Dale is currently a Research Associate at the University of California Santa Cruz and the lead developer for the MetaVid project. MetaVid is a community archive project for public domain US legislative footage. The MetaVidWiki software (which runs the archive) is a free software extension to MediaWiki that enables community engagement with audio/visual media assets and associative temporal metadata. Michael has been involved free & open media adoption on the web in collaboration with the xiph.org and annodex organizations.
Please join me in welcoming Michael!