DSF San Francisco 2005

Telling Stories, Taking Action

Described as a Feature Presentation by Natasha Freidus and Thaddeus Miles -a curated look at excellent works in community building

Mass Impact - Community Building - Self Expression and Healing

What makes good community building? What makes good multimedia?
Answer: Story.

• How do we use the stories we have made to make change?
• How do we integrate stories into social justice work
• How can we institutionalise training and distribution.

Renee's story - a digital story - was shown.
It was about addiction, the story of one individual - but it was also a call to action - in this case to vote for change.

• How do we move from being emotionally touched to taking action?

Bohille's Story is about a South African man who is HIV positive - to be used in Education. Produced by the Amy Hill Centre for Digital Storytelling it demonstrates effectively that your choices are your future

Thaddeus Miles spoke in a direct no nonsense style.
"Look around at your neighbours - Who's not here of the people you serve?"
Where do we need to go and which conversations do we need to have - lessons to learn from those who are doing it - mainly not in the US.
He said he walked around San Francisco as a photographer and all he could see was the homelessness - amongst all the great architecture the homeless people were all he could photograph. What are their stories?
Help funders understand what digital storytelling can do. How to dream a good dream and to understand their past history. There should be a digital storytelling institute in every state. How do you reach out to people in the communities who build homes to understand DS and to engage people in it?

Thaddeus is also President of the National Consortium for Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands. How does he get us into the communities that others are afraid to go into? How do we interact with them? It's not a technological gap - they have the latest. It's a sociological gap - fear. Look more at diversity.

These are bullet points from his presentation

• Distribution
• National
• Media that matters film festival
• Community based efforts
• Telling Our Legacies Digitally
• Giving out CDs of stories about domestic violence
• Documenting impact
• Students could be helping us to document
• How can we use digital storytelling to help the victims of trauma - e.g. Katrina

Access to all - giving people with disabilities access to the technology.
How do we present to people with disabilities - do we know the guidelines?

Drifting in Antarctica was shown- a film made at MOMI by/for deaf people. Made at MOMI

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Over coffee afterwards we were discussing the issues this presentation had thrown up - particularly about approach.

• Should we go and do digital storytelling to marginalised communities - won't that simply confirm their marginal status?

• Shouldn't we run workshops for the whole community - so that it can discover its unity.

posted by Dawnriser @ 21:45