“Open Source Video: Testing the Limits of Participatory Media Making" discusses an open source project that creatively uses emerging collaborative video production tools to examine the possibility of producing an organic documentary, a living document that can offer counter narratives to a culture of governmental secrecy produced by the on-going “war on terror”. This project’s research will be set directly and actively within the process of creating a dynamic (meaning “re-mixable) documentary film that tackles the pressing contemporary issues of security and surveillance using recently-developed collaborative and open source filmmaking techniques. The documentary video itself will be continuously updated and reassembled by various production communities – it is not simply a creative project built by a single group over a set timeframe, rather it is a documentary that any number of production communities can take part in, add to and sustain over many years. This project is guided by the belief that the act of creating itself is a form of inquiry and a form of knowledge creation that produces creative tools, methods, content and research outcomes.