Although we’d normally recommend a slightly more sophisticated camera for community projects, like the Panasonic GS35 (+/- $250, 1-chip, audio input), Pure Digital Technologies is offering an amazing deal to nonprofits on their Flip Video YouTube Camcorder.
One of my favorite participatory documentary films is Maquilapolis, a film by Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre with the participation of factory workers along the US-Mexico border. I saw it just this year and I was so impressed with the films’ integration of participant footage with very technically sophisticated helicopter shots and artsy scenes.
To create Maquilapolis, the filmmakers brought together factory workers in Tijuana and community organizations in Mexico and the U.S. to collaborate on a film that depicts globalization through the eyes of the women who live on its leading edge. The factory workers who appear in the film have been involved in every stage of production, from planning to shooting, from scripting to outreach. This collaborative process breaks with the traditional documentary practice of dropping into a location, shooting and leaving with the “goods,” which would only repeat the pattern of the maquiladora itself. The process embraces subjectivity as a value and a goal. It merges artmaking with community development to ensure that the film’s voice will be truly that of its subjects.
The filmmaker’s ongoing commitment to the community participants and organizations that they work with led them to hold an intensive video editing workshop just this year. Each participant created a short 3-5 min documentary about their life histories. They will have them posted on the site soon!
Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.
Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.
In September of this year, I joined a team of graduate students from various disciplines at UC Berkeley to learn about participatory new media and to engage in collective action. As journalists, environmental justice advocates, mass communications specialists, information theory researchers, and public health researchers, we brought a lot of perspectives to the table. Our professors Howard Rheingold (a renowned new media philosopher and collective action maven) and Xiao Qiang (a public scholar and activist blogger from China) led us through many months of new media bootcamp.
We created the Participatory Media Guidebook to introduce a range of participatory media tools for collective action to activists and social justice organizations around the world. The guide discussed what tools to use and when to use them. It is a wiki, so it will always be evolving and updating. Please participate by adding your own expertise on how to use new media to change the world.
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