Caricia Catalani from Institute for the Future on Vimeo.

Here are some highlights on this amazing conference by IFTF’s Mani Pande.

Highlights from Future of Video Conference

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Here are some of the interesting ideas that were shared by some of the expert panelists at the conference:

In the morning we had a panel with Howard Rheingold, Research Fellow, IFTF and Mimi Ito from UC, Irvine where they talked about user generated videos. Howard, who is an expert on the use of video for communication and teaching, talked about vernacular or informal video that is being created by non-experts. He pointed out that YouTube is providing new ways of doing things with video. There are probably new cultures that are developing on YouTube. Young people are going to YouTube to learn about new things like “how to videos” rather than Wikipedia.

Howard was quick to point out that video is more time consuming. In text you don’t get authentic presence of the person, but video does that making it more performative.
Mimi Ito, Research Scientist, UC, Irvine, correctly pointed out that most of the media today is made by amateurs. Amateur videos are entering everyday production and circulating in the same streams as professional work.

Ito who has studied Japanese youth said that camera phone was fostering new kinds of visual awareness among young people in Japan. Young people are paying attention to their environment because they carry cameras with them, and are always looking to capture everyday experiences with their peers. Ito also believes that to understand the future of video you need to understand the social context in which video is being created.

While discussing the new kinds of grammars and genres that are evolving, Robin Sloan, VP, Current TV, said that when Current TV asked viewers to make videos, most people were imitating journalist. It was a little bit of a disappointment. 90% were people acting as if they were on TV. Sloan believes that innovation is not flowing from people in their 20s. They are very risk averse. Instead you want to look at either side of bracket. Teenagers or older people.

Online performance artist Ze Frank pointed out that creativity and efficacy are not conjoint twins. What matters is how effective you are in conveying the message. Citing his own example, Ze said that advertisers gave him money because they liked being associated with this new powerful genre which makes people do stuff.

My colleague, Jess Hemerly, moderated a panel on authorship, appropriation and control with Alexander Cohen of UC, Berkeley and Paul Spinard, Author, the VJ Book. Jess made a wonderful video presentation, which can be found on this blog.

Hannah Eaves from Link TV and from Caricia Catalina UC, Berkeley, talked about the role of video in bringing about social change. Citing the Nirodh project in India where video was used to spread awareness on condoms, Catalina said that use of video has been highly effective in advocacy and intervention in public health. Hannah said that the strength of video is that it can cross language and literacy barriers and is effective in making people take action.

Check out some pics of our presentation at this year’s American Public Health Association meeting.  We had a great time with our friends from REACH NOLA.  Our presentation was packed, standing room only.  We presented with a panel of incredibly inspirational experts of community-based participatory research.

Join Freestyle Love Supreme for a Purpose Party to benefit the New Orleans VideoVoices Project!

presents

Freestyle Love Supreme:

Purpose Party for New Orleans

VideoVoices Project




Freestyle Love Supreme and COMIX are throwing a Purpose Party to raise funds for the New Orleans VideoVoices Project! Join Tony Award-winners Lin-Manuel Miranda and Bill Sherman plus Chris Jackson, Chris “Shockwave” Sullivan, Utkarsh Amudkar, Wade Allain-Marcus and Anthony Veneziale along with special guests for an evening of amazing hip-hop comedy for a great cause. Directed by Thomas Kail.

We will be having some awesome silent auction items up for bid (ITH Tickets and more!) and it’s going to be an excellent show.

The New Orleans VideoVoices Project works to build a groundswell of voices for change using community media, inspiring hard hit communities to tell their stories.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 8th
@ COMIX COMEDY CLUB
355 West 14th Street
7 pm and 9:30 pm

Tickets: $50 Advance / $60 (day of)
Students: $20 Advance / $25 (day of)


www.comixny.com

The New Orleans VideoVoices Project is a  REACH NOLA, VideoVoice Collective and community partnership.

For more information please visit:
www.video-voice.org or www.reachnola.org

-Freestyle Love Supreme

http://www.reverbnation.com/fls
Click here to put our songs on your Facebook profile.

Join us for a presentation on participatory video and human rights in New Orleans at the 2008 Human Rights Center Conference!

Conference, November 6, 2008, 10AM to 5PM
Alumni House, UC Berkeley

Health, Human Rights and Vulnerable Communities - 10:00 AM to 12 Noon (Toll Room)

Faculty Discussant: Cheri Pies, School of Public Health

• Caricia Catalani, School of Public Health, Berkeley, Participatory Video in New Orleans, USA

Abstract
Billions of people worldwide have gained access to the Internet, digital recording devices, and other new media tools.  More and more, these new media tools are used as innovative solutions to enduring human rights struggles, however often without critical understanding of their potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  To begin to understand these aspects of new media more thoroughly, this evaluation of the New Orleans Videovoice Project describes the processes and outcomes associated with a particular participatory video methodology: videovoice.

Like its predecessor photovoice, videovoice involves partnering with communities to research health and human rights situations by putting digital cameras in the hands of everyday people.  The New Orleans Videovoice Project took place in Central City, an underserved nieghborhood that was hit hard in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Those who have returned from displacement have faced a difficult recovery period involving loss of family and friends, loss of housing and possessions, closures of primary sources of health care, marginalization by government and its recovery programs, and the ongoing stress of piecing one’s life and the community back together.

The New Orleans Videovoice Project arose out of a need to organize around human rights and health concerns at this critical time.  By building a partnership of diverse community members from the Central City neighborhood, public health researchers, filmmakers, and human rights advocates, the project has produced several participatory documentary videos.  The videos describe the neighborhood’s historical and current struggle for human rights, and their own solutions for a better future.  Beyond videos, this highly participatory project has resulted in other critical outcomes, such as increased capacity to produce media, understanding of community strengths and concerns, individual empowerment, and engagement in community action.

• Krista Kshatriya, School of Law, Berkeley, World Health Organization/Southeast Asia Regional Office, India
• Miranda Ritterman, School of Public Health, Berkeley, Christian Children’s Fund, Angola
• Nobuko Mizoguchi, Demography, Berkeley, Global Health Access Project, Thai-Burma border

Lunch Break - 12 noon to 1:30 PM

• Friday, August 22, 7:pm at Ashe Cultural Center, New Orleans
• Saturday, August 23, 5:pm (previously scheduled 3:pm screening has been changed) at Zeitgeist Multimedia Arts Center, New Orleans

The picture on the left is the parking lot mural at the Ashe Cultural Center and on the right is Caricia on Camp Street (just south of Central City).

Orthea Castle Haley Road runs through the heart of Central City and it’s where many of the outreach centers are located. To the right is a lot on the south side of Central City.

We are staying just south of Central City in the Garden District on historic Magazine Street at the gracious McKendrick-Breaux House. Brett, owner with his partner Rachel, is giving us a volunteer discount as we are a 501(c)3.

It’s been really helpful for us to be close to Central City and get our feet on the ground. New Orleans is still a flyer and hand-shake town (as Jerald White from the Ashe Cultural Center put it) and so getting the word out means walking from building to building and talking face to face. There is still a lot of reticence about using the internet by most people who live in New Orleans and that’s going to take some adjusting on our part.

Some of our community partners invited us to sit in on a meeting in the Lower Ninth Ward’s Holy Cross neighborhood. The meeting was organized by the ________ Church’s Charles Allen and our partner Dr. Ben Springgate gave a short presentation on Healthy Living. I’ll post some footage of that in a later blog. It was really exciting to be there for what is most definitely the most engaged community meeting I’ve ever been to. Various committee chairs gave reports on subjects ranging from the Corps of Engineers progress to energy efficient light bulbs.

Caricia and I are very much looking forward to our training that will take place this weekend at the Ashe Cultural Center.

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.

Definition
Bookmarking is a system where people work together to bring together articles and works throughout the Internet by tagging them. For example, people can vote on something if it is informative as a suggestion for others to read it, or add it to a list of articles on the same topic.

My Favorite Examples
Del.icio.us, Digg

Why use it?
Sites such as Digg receive about 20 million hits a month. People who find something via social bookmarking are also more likely to trust the source, because it has been pre-approved by a human, instead of a list generated by a search engine. It’s also any easy way for people to check out what their friends are reading, and stumble across your site that way.

Sites such as Del.icio.us can be really helpful in saving, organizing, managing, and categorizing all of the websites that you want to remember. It’s easy to share tags through digg and find key websites by looking at others’ use of the same tag. Del.icio.us also allows you to see all of your bookmarks online, so you can access them and add to them from any computer.

Use Cases: Videovoice Example
Check out Caricia’s del.icio.us tag on all of the websites on “videovoice” that she has come across during the last 5 months. Here is a tag cloud of all her tags, including videovoice and dozens more, that she has used.

How to use
Sign up of an account at one of the social bookmarking sites above. Most of them will insert a toolbar, so whenever you see something relevant to your organization, tag-it!

Helpful/Interesting Links

• A general review of Social Bookmarking Tools (from D-Lib Magazine)
• Digg’s failing democracy (from the Download Squad)

After months of reading, analyzing, discussing, blogging, and tagging, we are happy to announce our final project: The Participatory Media Guidebook.

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.

New media offer an incredibly unique and new opportunity to address our current public health crisis. There are countless examples of this already happening with enormous success around the world. Sharing videos about condoms online can educate people in India about HIV, despite the mass media ban on such conversations. Blogging about outbreaks can get information about deadly epidemics to the World Health Organization well before a national government would admit to having a problem that might discourage tourist from coming to their coasts. Social networking sites can facilitate community organizing and mobilization of diasporas, such as Mexican migrant workers, that would otherwise not have the numbers to be a political force to demand healthy working conditions or access to medical treatment.

Caricia Catalani

“A vivid survey, Aufderheide’s book reminds us how crucial content and purpose are to the power and appeal of documentaries. When other films help us escape the world, these films return us to it with clarity and passion. This book lets us see how that is so.”

— Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, Professor of Cinema and Director of the Graduate Program, San Francisco State University

Visit the Center for Social Media’s website to read an excerpt.

Documentary Film is available at Amazon.com.

’If you announce a date a day in advance, the army and police show up’ and they ’beat the hell out of you,’ Dr. Alvi told the show. So he concluded it made more sense to organize very brief protests through telephone calls and other communication channels. At an appointed time, the protesters show up, pull out signs and shout slogans demanding an end to the state of emergency. After 10 minutes, they put away their signs and leave before the authorities can interfere with them.

’These flash protests are basically citizens protesting in a very smart way,’ Alvi said. So far the largest protest attracted around 50 protesters, who were quickly joined by random passers-by on the street. Pedestrians, though, have been somewhat puzzled by the brevity of each event.

’It’s almost called a guerilla protest,’ he added.

The NIH Partners in Research program is intended to engage the energy of a diverse group of scientists, community leaders, members of the public, and patient advocacy groups. It will seek to develop partnerships between scientific or research institutions and community organizations, and evaluate a variety of approaches in a range of target audiences or communities. The goals of the program are to:

• identify and implement new ways to increase science literacy;
• communicate the research needs and interests of communities; and
• encourage understanding of biomedical and behavioral research by partnering with community-sanctioned organizations, such as voluntary and professional organizations, health groups, faith-based groups, and housing organizations.

The NIH Partners in Research RFA is available on the NIH Guide website