Holmes Wilson of Downhill Battle‘s ParticipatoryPolitics.org is giving a lunchtime presentation at the Berkman Center (well, we’ve actually moved to a different building because the jackhammers on Mass Ave make every conversation come with its own headache) about their open source project that will enable people to watch RSS-based video. You’ll download a client and be able to “tune in” to the channels you like. E.g., you might decide to see what’s on the moveOn.org channgel.

Of course, you might also tune into any of the 500,000 porn channels, or fans of 24 who republish all of Series 3, or a channel showing a video of Star Wars III taped in a local theater. In order to achieve Downhill Battle’s political objective — to enable citizen participation — the client will have default channels and a channel guide. They’ve also been doing outreach to political organizations, trying to get them to provide channels. They’ll asl enable “del.icio.us-style republishing,” i.e., bookmark a feed and then socialize the bookmarks.

I love the idea of making RSS feeds be browsable the way TV is because it opens it up to a much wider group of people. Add to that Downhill Battle’s aim of enabling citizen voices, and I’m pretty damn enthusiastic about this. [Technorati tags: DownHillBattle media]

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