Steve Vosloo spent 5 days in Athens at the Internet Governance Forum, a UN event to discuss issues such as freedom of expression, censorship, multilingualism, local content, etc. He was there to be on a panel to discuss Emerging Issues from a Youth Perspective. The panel was held at the closing ceremony, about 400 people in the audience.
Steve spoke about the Digital Hero Book Project, explaining the need for physical access to ICTs and good bandwidth, and for fora such as this to keep exploring ways of creating safe and free — as in free expression — online spaces for youth.
He wrote a short piece on the significance of the event, from a UN perspective.
November 27th, 2006
Steve Vosloo just completed a 3-day workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling. It was lots of fun to go through the whole process of writing a script, collecting and editing images, recording an audio narration, and weaving it all together in video editing software. Some of the youths participating in the Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) will have the opportunity to tell their digital story in the form of a short movie.
The Center for Digital Storytelling is a partner with Molotech in the DHBP and will provide assistance with curriculum development of the digital storytelling aspect of the project.
November 18th, 2006
Steve Vosloo headed up to Boston for the day to meet with Gail Breslow, Director of the Intel Computer Clubhouse project. The very first computer clubhouse is located at the Museum of Science in Boston. Today there are 100 clubhouses around the world, each providing a creative and safe after-school learning environment where young people from under-served communities work with adult mentors to explore their own ideas, develop skills, and build confidence in themselves through the use of technology.
December 15th, 2006
Steve Vosloo met with Sarah Kramer of StoryCorps to introduce the Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) and ask for general advice. StoryCorps is a US-based project to instruct and inspire people to record each others’ stories in sound. Sarah made very useful suggestions, building on what Joe had spoken about. They discussed interview questions for the DHBP participants, logistics around doing the actual audio recordings, e.g. at different schools using a portable kit or at a permanent studio where the school learners come to record for a day.
December 21st, 2006
Steve Vosloo met with Joe Richman of Radio Diaries to introduce the Digital Hero Book Project (DHBP) and ask for general advice. The award-winning Radio Diaries “works with ordinary people to document their own lives for public radio.” For example, Thembi’s AIDS Diary covers a year in the life of a South African teenager who is struggling to live with AIDS.
Joe offered this advice on producing good quality audio stories: 1) it’s a real skill to produce compelling audio, 2) it takes a lot more time to edit than you think, so 3) if you’re working with a group of youth, make their involvement as simple as possible, e.g. get them to interview each other, read from prepared texts or record very short sound bites such as their dog barking.
December 19th, 2006
The second day of the “UN meets Silicon Valley” conference was open to the public. The event was organized by Intel and the UN Global Alliance for ICT & Development (UN GAID). Held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, it provided an interesting opportunity to explore the overlap between the developmental agenda of the UN and associated non-profit organizations and the market-driven, entrepreneurial and high-tech innovative spirit of Silicon Valley.
An extensive summary of the day by UN staff will be posted on the UN GAID website.
As an aside, Steve Vosloo and a few of other Digital Vision Fellows met Dr Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel.
February 28th, 2007
Steve Vosloo recently met Linda Johnson, Executive Director of Streetside Stories, a San Francisco-based non-profit literacy arts program. In 13 years, it has helped over 7000 students to share their life stories, connect with the arts, and improve their literacy skills. There is much overlap between the work of Molotech and Streetside Stories. Steve hopes to volunteer on their Tech Tales digital storytelling program and learn from this wonderful organization.
February 27th, 2007
“Socialight - the best way to create, share and discover cool things in the real world with Sticky Notes. Using the web or your mobile phone, you can find, create and tag location-based Stickies about nearly everything from great restaurants to secret sales to awesome parties.”
May 30th, 2007
“Telling stories, the location-based digital way” is an article written for iCommons by Steve Vosloo. In it he briefly introduces location-based digital storytelling and some of the many interesting, educational and fun projects that make use of free and easy-to-use tools to pin a story to a map, string a narrative along a physical path or feed stories directly to users as they move around a neighbourhood.
Location-based digital storytelling has relevance for digital hero booking because the project gets youth to describe, photograph or draw the communities in which they live.
May 15th, 2007
Nokia has announced the launch of seven new, low-end phones specifically aimed at consumers in emerging markets. Features include having multiple phone books on a phone (to allow for easy sharing of the phone between family members or friends), cost monitoring and flashlight. The phones will be available later this year.
What has all this got to do with projects like Digital Hero Book, you might wonder. Well, because our project is mostly based in developing countries, where mobile phones are usually more prevalent than PCs, we need to consider the roll of mobile phones in recording, accessing and sharing digital stories. As pervasive and increasingly powerful devices — with photo and video capabilities — mobile phones potentially compliment the project very well. Watch this space.
May 4th, 2007
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