I had the pleasure of meeting the charming (and surprisingly soft-spoken) JD Lassica (and about 20 other fine folks) at a dinner that he co-hosted with Marc Canter in San Francisco Wednesday night.

JD was there to raise awareness and solicit support for a project that he's championing, ourmedia.org (which completely resonates with my views on the revolution happening in personal content creation). What is it? Straight from the site:

"ourmedia.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video). Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action. Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative.

ourmedia is three things in one:

• an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop;
• a destination website at www.ourmedia.org -- preliminary docs are up on the site, with a beta launch scheduled for October 2004;
• eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, semi-professional, and professional visual works and other media."

The ourmedia.org site is currently password protected while they are in pre-launch mode (if I understood correctly, they are looking to go live in November). Between now and then, JD is looking for some help with the site, particularly development help. To learn more about the project and/or volunteer to help, head to their open site, www.open-media.org.