Open Source for Filmmaking: why not?

What if a single Wikipedia page was a comprehensive documentary on the subject? But open to the same methodology of edits, discussion, revisions, merges – and the potential to fork? What would be lost? What would be gained?

What if a factual documentary director was like an open source software maintainer, who created and maintained the latest cut of a film? Who responded to comments and criticism and maintained that branch to the best of their ability; but with no way of preventing others from forking or merging the work into their own work? How would they be paid? And if they’re paid, how would other contributors be paid?

There are other questions - what is the best way to sum up a Wikipedia page as a video? Probably it depends on audience and on how much time people have to engage with the subject. A 12 hour film might be the most in-depth overview of a topic and its various discussions; but a ten-minute animation might be the most engaging and easily understood. A beginner and expert both will both want to watch different films.

Furthermore, how would neutral point-of-view – a key concept of Wikipedia –  conflict with the authorial voice which makes documentary interesting and compelling? Would an open source film need to follow a bland and averaged-template? Or should it be a working methodology to allow any filmmaker with a passion or interest to create work in a way that’s collaborative, shareable and open to a future of change – but that doesn't seek or need to make their voice uniform?

These questions are big in themselves but somewhat hypothetical: Open Source filmmaking has been attempted since at least 2006 with the short animation Elephant's Dream, and Matt Hanson’s Swarm of Angels project, but it hasn't taken off. The Open Video Movement, made big strides to cement an open video architecture – both at distribution end, with the Broadcast Machine (RSS-based video channels) and the Miro Player (iTunes for open video streams) using an decentralised approach that exists today with podcasts and news RSS – and at production end. Inspired by filmmaker Brett Gaylor (RIP: A Remix Manifesto) – Mozilla funded the Popcorn project to take collaborative editing of video timelines into the open web era, but to add all range of innovative magic alongsides. Relatives of the project like Hyperaudio continue still, but at some point the Open Video movement slowed down: certainly Apple's decision to drop Flash in favour of the HTML5 video tag took some fo the driving motivation out of the movement. Something shifted around 8-10 years ago and focus has moved elsewhere.

Perhaps what is most interesting or urgent to the question of open source non-fiction film, at least for me given my background with the Film Finance Handbook, is how it’s funded and how it’s sustained? Film is different to open source in that filmmakers often work on minimum wage jobs in the service sector when not making films; while coders good enough to contribute to open source software may earn enough to only need to work 2-3 days a week. If no-one is paid for open video, what's to prevent the best and most-professional versions of any project quickly becoming the ones with corporate sponsors or biased political/state backing? History written by the best funded Wikipedia editors is already a vulnerability in the system, and hardly needs exporting to documentary. What if the main barrier to opening documentary as a viable model for any filmmaker is financial sustainability?

There's two projects going on for me here.

• On the one hand, I want to tell the story of open source for people who aren't developers, whose understanding of it maybe goes no further than it's free, which misses the most interesting aspects of it.
• On the other hand, I want to figure out the tools and business model(s) for making an open source film. That's my itch, to quote Eric S Raymond. I want my film about Open Source to be Open Source, so that the first time someone says "ooh but why haven't you interviewed X" or covered Y I can just say "interview them and make a pull-request" or "fork it and make your own version". And that's where it gets complex, because if their version is the one that sells to HBO for millions, I want to make sure the people who worked on the original version get a place in the 'waterfall' (the payment of residuals from TV/etc sales).

It's been the three passions of my career: film, finance, and open source technology. With so many problems in the world it may a strange area to focus on. But it has two ideas at his heart: we need new revenue models for factual and informative video; and we need more collaborative forms of documentary story-telling. Our history is told by those who are funded to tell it; but as we as a world culture learn more and more about our histories it's clear voices excluded from these stories need to have access to the microphone.