We are now embarked on development of our first ‘living archive’ prototype. We are aiming to have this up and running by mid November if possible. We have been having a lot of discussions about what the nature of this prototype should be, related to questions of what precisely it is for and what we are aiming to test and discover through it. Our current thinking is that P1 is about, as Reuben said last week,’giving everyone at Circus Oz the (digital) key to the [archive room] video cupboard’- making accessible through a simple online interface as many of the show videos as possible, from earliest to recent, with a simple search capacity using the basic (and incomplete) metadata we/Circus Oz currently can attach to those videos. Lukman is building a video serving system using the open source Kaltura software and we plan to serve P1 from RMIT (leaving open the option for later prototypes to be served from elsewhere (the cloud, most likely) as the projected usage scales up. The principle underlying P1 is that it is simple and sketchy and everything about it can be revised/migrated/exported as required as it morphs into P2 and beyond.

We have established that the user groups who will be able to use and interact with P1 will be those who have the greatest stake in them: the two inner circles on the diagram below: Circus Oz present and past members, those who are in the videos and/or just offscreen, as it were (backstage or in the office). (The diagram itself, by the way, is a quick and dirty ‘thinking picture’ that needs to be further refined and theorised.)

P1 won’t be open to the public as there are still issues that need to be worked through within Circus Oz and its community before such a step can be defined: (e.g. should all videos be available publicly? If so, under what conditions? If not, what should be? etc)