Forgotten stories from the other
Describe your project – 1800 characters:
This 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.



