For the past two days, Dean and I have been at the amazing Netsquared conference in Santa Clara. Netsquared brings together an amazing group of non-profit tech projects, funders, and silicon valley folks. We’ve met some amazing folks and made some connections that will be very helpful.

And we also had some great success in the conference ‘competition’. We were voted last month to be one of 21 finalists from the 160 projects that applied to the conference website. Today, at the end of the conference, we were voted 2nd place among those 21!

The other big winners, MAPLight and Freecycle, are both amazing projects, so we’re thrilled to be in such good company. And we also met a bunch of other wonderful organizations, hopefully many of which will soon be using Democracy Player to reach their constituents.

Huge thanks to the Netsquared team, which put together a really well thought out and perfectly executed conference. It was a huge help for us and a bunch of other great projects.

I am absolutely thrilled to announce today that we’ve received a grant from Mozilla, creators of Firefox. Mozilla shares our mission, almost to the letter– they are a non-profit, building open tools that defend and expand the fundamentally democratic nature of the internet. What they are doing for the web, we want to do for video.

I am so proud of our team for building Democracy Player (soon to be called Miro) to the point that we have a chance to make an real impact on mass media. We aren’t there yet, but I feel like we’re moving within striking distance.

Having Mozilla’s support is a vote of confidence that we deeply appreciate. Here’s Mozilla’s announcement of the grant.

I’ve just setup a new IRC chat room for volunteers and supporters that want to chat and maybe get involved in the project. The room is #team.miro (irc.freenode.net).

I’ll probably be there on and off during the week, but I’ll also be having a weekly chat every Tuesday at 5:30pm (EST). I’ll try to be there for at least 30 minutes, longer if a good conversation is going.

Topics can include:

• General questions, suggestions or ideas for Democracy/Miro/PCF
• Ways to get involved, and help us in our mission to spread open standards for internet video
• Making more connections between volunteers
• Whatever else seems interesting

What is IRC Chat?
IRC is a way to chat on the internet. It’s a bit old and a bit geeky, but it works well and is pretty standard.

How do I Join?
Right this minute, we don’t have a web based (i.e. easy to use) gateway to the IRC chat room, but we will have one up soon. In the mean time, you might want to try the Firefox extension, Chatzilla.

I’ll post here, as soon as we have a web chat client for the channel.

We finally have a Release Candidate for Democracy Player 0.9.6. We would love your help trying it out and letting us know if you find any new bugs. This version has a lot of new features, including the ability to watch any folder on your computer for new videos, to resume playback of a video when you stop halfway, minimize to tray on windows, keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, better Windows Vista compatibility, and more.

You can download it here: Democracy Player 0.9.6 RC

You can report bugs here: file a bug report.

Keep in mind that this is pre-release software and may contain serious bugs.