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Here is an amazing opportunity for somebody "independently wealthy" to make a real difference: set up a fund that pays for close-captioning of any free content

by 4WIW 10y ago

Here is an amazing opportunity for somebody "independently wealthy" to make a real difference: set up a fund that pays for close-captioning of any free content coming out of Berkeley.

rasz_pl 10y ago
or someone in Russia just torrenting whole thing
0xFFC 10y ago
Why some body rich? Why not start NGO like website for this? each of us,would contribute a little bit 1$. And that site would have investment to recurit people for subtitling. Is this idea feasible? P.s. Your idea completely makes sense. I wish google instead of wasting money in many different ways(for example starting cs education site , which of course will be not even close to what Berkeley offers) would do this. Anyone would do this ,would become my here, literally.
- 4WIW 10y ago
  By all means, if crowdsourcing can work in this case, that would be a great positive example of community taking responsibility.
Kadin 10y ago
It's not clear that there's really that much demand for captioning. There's a CA law that's created a perverse opportunity for aggrieved individuals to try and extort money out of public institutions who put content online; it's not clear to me that they represent a bona fide constituency in need of captioning. (I'm sure that such a bona fide need does exist, but I don't think the people pushing Berkeley in this case are it.) Transcribing every video might be a terrible use of resources, unless there are other benefits of the transcripts (which might be the case; search would be a nice side effect). A better solution would be to allow a user to request a captioned version of a video and then have it farmed out to volunteers. It would be a much more reasonable amount of effort (with some ratelimiting to prevent asshat behavior or scripting) and you'd be sure to transcribe the content that users actually want first. By chunking a video up, you might be able to transcribe it quite quickly, too. If I did need video captioning, I'd much rather have a system like that, vs. hoping that some multi-year effort to transcribe everything has hit the one video I need today. However, it's not clear that such a solution would actually help Berkeley, because of the asinine way the laws are written.

by 4WIW 10y ago

Here is an amazing opportunity for somebody "independently wealthy" to make a real difference: set up a fund that pays for close-captioning of any free content coming out of Berkeley.

rasz_pl 10y ago

or someone in Russia just torrenting whole thing

0xFFC 10y ago

Why some body rich? Why not start NGO like website for this? each of us,would contribute a little bit 1$. And that site would have investment to recurit people for subtitling. Is this idea feasible? P.s. Your idea completely makes sense. I wish google instead of wasting money in many different ways(for example starting cs education site , which of course will be not even close to what Berkeley offers) would do this. Anyone would do this ,would become my here, literally.

4WIW 10y ago
By all means, if crowdsourcing can work in this case, that would be a great positive example of community taking responsibility.

Kadin 10y ago

It's not clear that there's really that much demand for captioning. There's a CA law that's created a perverse opportunity for aggrieved individuals to try and extort money out of public institutions who put content online; it's not clear to me that they represent a bona fide constituency in need of captioning. (I'm sure that such a bona fide need does exist, but I don't think the people pushing Berkeley in this case are it.) Transcribing every video might be a terrible use of resources, unless there are other benefits of the transcripts (which might be the case; search would be a nice side effect). A better solution would be to allow a user to request a captioned version of a video and then have it farmed out to volunteers. It would be a much more reasonable amount of effort (with some ratelimiting to prevent asshat behavior or scripting) and you'd be sure to transcribe the content that users actually want first. By chunking a video up, you might be able to transcribe it quite quickly, too. If I did need video captioning, I'd much rather have a system like that, vs. hoping that some multi-year effort to transcribe everything has hit the one video I need today. However, it's not clear that such a solution would actually help Berkeley, because of the asinine way the laws are written.