Metavid is a community legislative video archive project. Its principal participants are Michael Dale, Abram Stern and professor Warren Sack. It was initially a thesis project at university of Santa Cruz CA, and was then funded by sunlight foundation for a year.

The metavid project is working to change the world on a few fronts:
Metavid makes legislative video more accessible so people can keep tabs on their representatives. We capture the full days proceedings and make full stream url accessible/embeddable/downloadable. This brings primary source legislative video footage into online political dialog. This should change the world by democratizing and opening up who decides what legislative video material is relevant. (in contrast to a broadcast model where only cable news corporations have access to private legislative video archives) For a detailed version of the above argument see my thesis paper ;)
All the footage is also made searchable from the text transcripts, who is on the screen and soon will be searchable by other temporal semantic properties (ie: bill debate:=bill name)

MetaVidWiki is open source software based on the same software that runs Wikipedia. This means communities can point metavid at their own dataset and be in full control of the reception of their message. This will change the world by enabling NGOs and tech collectives to take control over the reception of their message. We have not officially launched metavid yet but we already have a few interested parties and at least one full deployment.
MetaVidWiki uses open source video format ogg theora and has developed tools to make it easier to use free and open formats. This ensures video is accessible in free software platforms and ensures there are no patent licensing fees or corporate taxes on audio visual communication. Also see a blog post on why free/open video should be a standard: here