[esocialaction] open documentary project - draft proposal

[Maja van der Velden]

Hi Yuwei and Andy,

I had a quick look at your draft proposal. Great, not only as a  
project but as a way of thinking about the tools we want to design  
and use for creating collective memory. In the same batch with your  
message came one that announced that the state of Massachusetts in  
the US is adopting Open Documents standards for all it old and new  
documents:

"In a series of discussions regarding a preferred document format,  
the state emphasized "fair use" capabilities beyond just viewing and  
reading government data. The state also stressed that the new  
document format must be able to stave off incompatibility as desktop  
software changes over time. (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ 
nf/20050907/tc_nf/38087)

You can´t build digital collective memories on softwares that change  
over time and become incompatible with previous version. This is a  
strong point for the proposal!

I have one comment or addition. I see one of the strengths of FLOSS  
the potential of users to become the designers of their own software.  
This is important from a gender perspective and in the same way from  
the perspective of the diversity in which our stories are told  
(before they technologically mediated).

Technology can be resisted, appropriated, of course, but if diversity  
is not written in the code, technology will limit the ways in which  
we can tell our stories. FLOSS allows us to write the way we want to  
tell our story into the code. It is therefore important that story- 
tellers become the designers of the technology with which they tell  
their story. In a way you say it in the proposal:

"Afterwards, we will use story-telling narrative method to design the  
film-making technologies. During this design process, the public are  
will be encouraged to take part and interact with designers, learn to  
use the technologies and help to produce the film. In so doing, not  
only FLOSS tools' developers involved in the filmmaking, but also a  
community of people are engaged in contributing to the filmmaking.  
Thus, such a multidisciplinary research project also build practical  
and handy tools that people can use in their everyday lives. "

The strength of the proposal is that it proposes to overcome the  
divide between designers and story-tellers (users): story-tellers  
become designers, designers become film-makers, etc. Technology  
functions often as a "boundary-setter". With FLOSS we can put the  
story and the story-teller back to the foreground. Maybe this point  
should be made more explicit in the proposal.

Greetings, Maja

BTW I just read an interesting article on gender and design in ICT by  
Oudshoorn, Rommes, Stienstra (2004) in Science, technology, & Human  
Values, Vol. 29 No.1, Winter 2004 30-63. About the pitfalls of user- 
centred design and design-for-all. Even more relevant for FLOSS design!

On 7 Sep, 2005, at 12:21, Yuwei Lin wrote:

> Dear All,
>
> Following up our enthusiastic discussion on an open documentary  
> project earlier, Andy and I have drafted a proposal for the EU IST  
> FET Call 5 (see attached and also http://fp6.cordis.lu/fp6/ 
> call_details.cfm?CALL_ID=55 and http://fp6.cordis.lu/fp6/areas.cfm? 
> CALL_ID=55#164). We are planning to submitted this proposal through  
> the EU instrument "special targeted research project'.
>
> If interested, please take a look at the draft proposal and add  
> your valuable insight to it. We are also hoping an experience  
> person can take the lead of the proposal now as a core contact for  
> submission. We are looking forward to seeing how this draft  
> transpires.
>
> Best wishes,
> yuwei
>
> -- 
> Yuwei Lin | yuwei at ylin dot org
> http://www.ylin.org
>
> <Open_Documentary_v2.rtf>
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