I finally made it back to post about another presenter at this month's Creative Common Salon. *Phew*
Sharon Daniel, from UC Santa Cruz, spoke on her project, Palabras, a participatory video and media project for communities that are not connected to technology. Instead of individuals being bloggers or podcasters and representing a network, communities would be the collective voice for their local region. Currently, they have projects set up in several Buenos Aires shantytowns, San Francisco, and Darfur.
They introduce these communities to Palabras with simple tools -- an altered single-use digital video camera and a simple web application similar to that they use in gaming and chat -- and training in those tools. Videos are recorded and put into a database; users can tag their works, creating their own folksonomies. Currently, there are 5,000 clips. Communties can reference these videos through the tags, begin to make connections between various stories, and create a shared language. A bio of Sharon describes the project as "designed to facilitate Collective self-representation by employing folksonomies (folk + taxonomy) to generate sequences of original video clips based on the semantic associations given to clips by their authors."
I look forward to seeing where Palabras goes and if it can become a valuable space for empowering the voices of collectives and citizen journalists in impoverished areas.
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