Forgotten stories from the other
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$800,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$900,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
3 yearsThis project will utilize GPS enabled mobile phones to allow people within a local community who are marginalized due to disability to publish and share there own stories about there day to day lives, including the challenges and the joys. In doing so it will give voice to the individual and their stories, rather than being an object of observation or the "other" when viewed by mainstream media. This information can then be used to bring about changes to peoples lives by informing social and community care policies and practice.
People can post messages that include text, audio, pictures and tags dependent upon the issues or what the person is seeking to describe. These are emailed directly from the phone to a web site managed by the community. Post are automaticaly and systematically aggregated and mapped using GPS data within a Drupal CMS, where they can be shared and commented on.
The use of geo spacial data reinforces the idea of place and its meaning to the individual and community. It also highlights the interconnectedness of peoples lives and experiences living within a common geographic space. The use of a common taxonomy and meta data tagging scheme by the project enables stories to be readily indexed and sorted. It also facilitates the linking of the stories to existing data and information collected by government and other agencies thus enhancing the site as a community knowledge resource.
The project will build upon open source software already developed and seek to build a tool kit ( ie module for Drupal and software program on phone to automate postings) that can be readily appropriated by any community seeking to work collectively together to understand common problems and publish there stories in a sustainable, systematic and organized way.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
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How is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
Innovation
This project is unique in that it seeks to document and publish the lives of people with disabilities who are traditionally excluded from main steam information flows. The project will enable individuals to document there experience of specific geographical place and associated issues and its meaning for them, via mobile phones using text, photographs, audio and tags. This information will be linked to traditional data sources used by local, state and national governments. The site will allow members of the community to post comments and additional information on the web site.
In doing so, it will be possible to build up a detailed and textured picture of a geographic place, its rhythms and its meaning for the people who live in that community and the issues they face day to day. Such a web site will become a information and knowledge resource within the community. This information can be used be used to inform and monitor community care and social care polices and practices and bring about real change in the lives of people with disabilities at a local level.
By using mobile phones people will be able to make posts from within there community as they go about there daily lives. The mobile phones have the advantage of being "normative" piece of technology for many people while computer ie desk top or lap top are considered to be out side normative experience of many people.
The project will build upon the work of Antoni Abad and zexe.net who has used mobile phones successfully within Europe, South America and Canada to record and document the lives of people who are often marginalize in many different cities around the world including those who are homeless, people with disabilities and motor boys in San Paulo.
However this project is significantly different from zexe.net in that it will use standardized meta data to enable persons stories to be linked to existing data sources. The proposed project work with a community development capacity building framework which works with existing groups to achieve local goals and build communication and organizational strengths consistent with the needs and aspirations of that community. To this end the communities will operate within the creative commons framework determine ownership and control of information and associated data and its subsequent reuse by others.
Again the project is unique in that it will be run across several counties both to develop strategies and software that are portable across the world but to also link up different geographic communities across the world to share common experiences of people with disabilities. Because the project utalises meta data from WHO (International Classification of Function) it will enable real comparisons within and across different communities.
The project will develop or enhance two pieces of open source software. The first is to enhance the Drupal's capacity to import data and and link it to geospatial information the second to enable the easy collection of data and transmission of data to web site via email from mobile phone.
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
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