I was sad that so few attended this talk. He did tell his tale to a much larger audience the next day at another conference, but he had a valuable tale that deserved more listeners of the journalist variety. (News of this talk was circulated in journalist circles.) Here are my brief notes from his lessons learned about crowdsourcing “an interactive documentary of the events in Egypt” that occurred from January 25th to February 11th 2011.

My notes from the talk

Mehta describes how he watched the tale unfold on television. He noticed that many, many people were holding up their mobile phones to record the events. He thought that must be a rich source of material that could reveal many stories from those turbulent days.

Inspiration came from the Hypercities project at UCLA.

You have loads of content from all those who recorded what happened. How do you add context to that? Deep meta tagging is required.

You need to go to the streets to find the stories. In Egypt, only 25% have internet access and the internet quality is often poor. How can people who have content share it in those conditions? What about people who have tales and no devices for sharing?

The team behind 18 Days is teaching journalism to 30 students. Those people, in turn, can help collect the stories. They will learn how to approach people and how to encourage them to share their stories. They will make “pop-up shops” on Tahrir Square and elsewhere. People cannot afford the price of sending text messages (SMS). These pop-up shops are places people can stop by and tell their stories. The plan is to use raw material – nothing prepared. It’ll be all about the tagging. When you get context-rich material, the media will tell the story. The aim is also to highlight differences at various spots.

The goal is 5000 unique stories. Of course, the overall goal is to share this with the Egyptian people. Some people who were hesitant about sharing their experiences became eager when they realized that this could be a legacy to future generations – that they could one day tell their own grandchild “this is what I did during these important days in Egypt’s history”.

On the technology side, they are using Popcorn from Mozilla. Most of their software is open source, but they may have to build some parts themselves.

In the following picture, Mehta is talking about the site “I am Jan 25″ that is being displayed in the slide on the screen behind him. It is another example of aggregating information in one place.

My thoughts from the talk

I was very excited by the way they planned to engage people in this project. Those journalist-trained students will have to tell tales to get tales.

The entire process of collecting content and tagging it properly is a tale unto its own. I noted that they were creating a process that tells story and gives the whole thing a life of its own. “18 Days in Egypt” is the main tale, but a secondary tale is emerging from the entire process of making that main tale.

I picked up some new (to me) terms in this talk: transmedia and cross-media. (PS I also found an article that debunks some myths about transmedia that is worth a read.)

The stories from 18 days in Egypt are very important to tell the world. From a professional viewpoint, I think the process of producing this documentary is tremendously exciting. Anyone in journalism or communication or video/film production can learn a lot from the processes that are coming out of this project. I hope they document that as well.

I’ve always loved baking bread. I know I learned to bake bread when I was a teenager, but I have few recollections of those breads. I know some were sweet and most were incredibly flat and heavy despite being baked in a form and using yeast. I may have been heart-broken, but my dad never complained. The bread disappeared completely when in his care. I wasn’t afraid to experiment, either. An uncle was coming over for dinner in my early bread-baking years, and I thought I’d make some special dinner rolls. I added blue food coloring, blue being my favorite color. To my great disappointment, no one wanted to eat them!

Years later, I became more conscious of the beauty of the creation of bread. It wasn’t doing something fancy like adding blue coloring. It was the awareness of the amazing science that happens when you mix flour, yeast, and liquid. I feel like an artist when kneading the dough. Without thinking about it, I visualize the mouth-watering finished product as I blend the ingredients with my hands.

There is a real sense of creation when making bread. I was always fascinated by the power of the yeast. If I added the yeast to a bowl with warm milk and butter, I loved to see the tell-tale bubbles that appeared on the surface of the mixture. Leaving a small ball of dough in a bowl and finding it doubled an hour later is always a moment of magic and beauty.

My Bread Tale from the Past

My best bread-making adventures were on the road to India. In 1978, I traveled overland from Denmark to India and Nepal. Our journey started out in a rush to get out of Europe ahead of a winter that would be one of the biggies. We left Denmark on 1 February 1978 and crossed the border to Nepal from India on 4 March 1978. Most of the time, we were driving all day and all night. Our breakfast along the way was always tea and bread. The bread was baked fresh every morning. Inside our converted 1955 Bedford bus, we had a stove that ran on bottled gas.

I would rise from my spot in the giant bunkbed at the back of the bus every morning at dark o’clock. An important item in our luggage was a 50-kilo sack of whole-wheat flour. We also stocked up on fresh water each day. I prepared the bread using our dining table to knead the dough, and then I placed the dough in a bowl, covered it with a dishtowel and set it by the heater to rise for an hour. I sat with the driver and navigator, watching the road flow by under our wheels, waiting for the bread to rise. When ready, the dough was kneaded and shaped into loaves and put in the oven to rise a bit more. Then, I turned on the oven to bake the bread. It was probably terribly dangerous to have an operating gas oven inside a bus, but I have lived to tell the tale. To top things off, I filled our giant kettle with water and put it on the burner to boil. Open flame inside the bus. Yeah, well, this was 32 years ago. Back when you could eat raw cookie dough…

When the water boiled, I made the tea and started to wake people up. The driver quickly found a place to stop (easily done as we were in sparsely populated areas and there was little traffic.) I could pull the freshly baked bread out of the oven and onto the table, where it was topped with a bit of jam before disappearing into seven hungry tummies – all washed down by tea. YUM!

Bread just out of the oven hits all of your senses. What a way to start the day! Thanks for triggering a delicious trip down memory lane, Nic.

What can I do with this?

• Discipline – it seems easy enough now, but it might be easy to forget to take at least one picture a day at some point. Training the habit consciously at first is my way to tackle that issue.
• Practice – I need to test my camera a lot more. I have had it for two years now, and I still haven’t understood all its features. Not that it is complex, but I don’t know how to switch between options quickly when the situation calls for it. I am also uncertain about the ideal method for certain situations. I end up with pictures that I discard because they are blurry in a bad way, not an artistic way!
• Storytelling – I plan to tell a story of some kind with each picture, but the entire string of pictures will tell a story, or two or three. I’d like to learn about the visual aspect of storytelling because I tend to focus on the written word of storytelling. While I take the pictures, I’d like to think about the image from the perspective of someone who is visually impaired. That might sound bizarre, but my interest in accessibility makes me work to develop an awareness of other means of perception.

Follow my experiments and experiences on Flickr in My Project 365 – 2010.

There are a million stories in the naked city, and a million cities.

I think one of the first blogs I ever read – and ever loved – was San Francisco Stories. Its author, Derek Powazek, reached around the globe to me with his wonderful storytelling. Later, he started the City Stories project. The lead-in quote on this blog post comes from that site’s tagline. I discussed starting a “Copenhagen Stories” site with someone, but neither of us were committed enough at the time. When I learned that the City Stories project had stopped, I felt partly to blame. I thought it was an excellent idea that deserved to survive.

A recent internet search revealed only one site in Manchester, UK with the city-stories theme. It shows no connection to Powazek’s original theme, but it does continue the idea of anyone sharing their anecdotes and stories. One other search result intrigued me: White City Stories. It takes the city storytelling to another level with its controlled story about Arequipa, Peru, a sister city to Charlotte, North Carolina. By controlled, I mean that the entire site has a fixed purpose or content strategy, as compared to the more user-generated-content idea behind earlier city-stories sites.

Why the storytelling fixation? It comes from my two weeks immersion at the Fresh Air Center during the recent Copenhagen Climate Conference (COP15). There were so many people at the center with fascinating stories to share – their own as well as the stories of others. When the COP15 produced no constructive results, I realized it was left to the people of the world – not the governments – to repair Earth’s climate problems. Storytelling is one powerful way to start those repairs.

You might think that storytelling is a face-to-face experience such as your parents telling you a goodnight story. Actually, it is a mind-to-mind or heart-to-heart experience, which is why it translates so well to the internet. Discussing the technical aspects of climate change can be complicated with all the data involved. How do you explain this topic to the general public when scientists are arguing about it? Storytelling.

Storytelling can help us relate to those people affected by drought, flooding, and other disasters that disrupt or destroy their way of life. For example, Peruvian farmer Cayetano Huanca is a climate witness who told his story in the Fresh Air Center, thanks to Oxfam. Tanzanian farmers tell their stories in the Unheard Voices book put together by Andy, Rachel, and Bob.

Unheard Voices book

There are millions of these stories waiting to be told. They can be loosely collected stories on one site or across many blogs, or they can be edited collections of stories such as the White City project. The storytellers will determine the packaging. The independent bloggers, photojournalists, journalists, video journalists, and citizen journalists started this effort in Copenhagen. It’s a new wave of “city stories”. The stories have always been there, but the number of storytellers and the methods of storyteling have grown tremendously.

How will the audience react? The first step is to listen.