OaktownLive

Just wanted to let people know that for the rest of the month of May, Team Oaktown Live will not be streaming much if at all.

Partially it’s because Pirate will be on the road working & just plain won’t be available. On top of that, TOL also has a WHOLE LOT OF FOOTAGE from the last several months that we’ve hardly had time to process, in particular from May Day. We’ve got a lot of editing to do of a lot of looong footage from which we want to make highlight clips that people can actually go back and watch.

Regarding livestreaming: the ability to connect live video of newsworthy events to the world is a powerful tool. When somebody tells Pirate that they were watching the stream earlier and came out to participate in person, or when a commenter on the social stream says they’ve learned things about Oakland they didn’t know before, it feels like we’re making a difference, even if it’s a small one.

But streaming is also quite an expensive tool right now. Part of TOL’s downtime will be to spend some time considering how we want to continue with this “Oakland-based citizen journalism” project that we feel called to, and how to do it without letting it eat up such a huge chunk of the TOL household budget.

One of the new tools TOL is looking to add to the CJ toolkit is Signal. It’s being called “The Instagram for Citizen Journalists” and looks like it’s got a lot of potential. We’ve signed up as beta testers and look forward to its roll out.

Love, peace, justice, compassion, meaningful life pursuits, and generally all good things to everyone everywhere, nobody excluded…

Pirate & Lexica