Nicholas Reville, Holmes Wilson and Tiffiniy Cheng were three smart teen-agers at Doherty Memorial High School and Mass Academy, when they met. But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that they teamed up with Nick Nassar, a computer-science graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute to form a the core group of what is now Participatory Culture. 

Working from a cooperative house and Reville's mother's attick the team in their mid-20s -- with four collaborators scattered about Massachustts, Canada, France and New York, have developed what could be described as the browser for Web 2.0. Its a 7MB downloadable piece of software which functions as a gateway to managing video podcasts. Think of it as the Netscape browser for web-delivered TV.  The Macintosh version has been out for months, but during the last week of February, 2006, Participatory Culture open up the source for downloading of a PC version from www.getdemocracy.com.  Now 100,000 downloads later, there are 350 channels of video content you can view.

The Democracy Internet TV Platform manages video for you. You can set it to download the latest video podcast during the night, so that when you're awake, the feed is already sitting on your computer. You can upload information about videos you've created, and share them with others using the Demoracy browser.

Participatory Culture is a Washington, D.C.-charter not-for-profit which is seeking tax-exempt status from the federal govenment, says Reville. It has received development financing from Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp. (a angel venture-capital investor who is behind another non-stock startup -- CivicSpaceLabs), and Andrew Rappaport, a California venture capitalist.

Listen to an interview with Nick Reville contacted by Bill Densmore, of the Media Giraffe Project, on Wed., March 1, 2006, in Worcester:

Download participatory_culture_nick_reville-03-01-06.mp3 (14.9MB; 32 mins.)