apc.au blog

The net has its fare share of cultural activists, but none more experienced at the business of social change through cultural endeavour than author and Circus Oz co-founder, Jon Hawkes.

We’ve recently had the pleasure of working with Jon and the Cultural Development Network on a new blog, fourthpillar.biz.

Jon describes the Fourth Pillar blog as being designed to:

… give you and me the opportunity to develop more articulate expressions of the ways that cultural action can support the development of societies whose members are engaged and empowered.

Jon goes further to ask:

Has a consciousness of how social meaning is constructed through public planning processes developed among those who do it?

Has the essential contribution of regular, participatory and collaborative community-based creative activities to the well-being and sustainability of society been recognised by our representatives?

We’re wrapped to have worked with Jon on the Fourth Pillar blog, one of the sites that I do hope stimulates the kind of discussion it seeks in this the year we make a difference!

Late 2008 a sensational homage to Creative Commons (CC) usage within Australasia was published. Edited by Rachel Cobcroft and produced in collaboration with the team at the Australian Creative Commons Clinic, Building an Australasian Commons features a vast repertoire of projects and initiatives that have employed Creative Commons licenses.

We are very proud and honoured to have been invited to have some of our projects represented here. Such a work has been a long-time coming.

Creative Commons is calling for more case studies to their wiki, also initiated by the energetic and inspired Rachel Cobcroft. Write up a story of your experiences with CC licenses or learn how others are using them.

Go CC wiki – Case Studies.

The Karen community, for whom 2009 is ancient history, will celebrate the year 2748 this December. Australia is host to a growing number of Karen who arrived here as refugees having fled their homelands in Burma.

In 2007, or rather, 2746, we began working with the Melbourne based Cultural Development Network on an internet video production series, Homelands, for young people from the Karen and Sudanese communities. The idea is to co-produce video pieces discussing their perceptions of homeland with other young people from Karen and Sudanese communities abroad, and where possible, those still living in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border and / or Kenya and the Southern Sudan respectively.

This afternoon I worked with a group of Karen young people who have formed a web development team to start the work of producing a site that will support, develop and promote collaborative video production amongst themselves and young Karen abroad.

They arrived with a draft plan for their website, however it had not included any scope for supporting the video production project. What it did provide though, was a clear outline of information flows that would inform, guide and promote the project. It just needed the Homelands components added.

I showed them through Vibewire, SlumTV and EngageMedia. As I talked through each of these projects Homelands Project Officer, Kirsty Baird, logged onto a chat room on karen.org and found someone involved with the Karen community in California who not only makes videos but was keen to gather up stills and videos from Karen living there. The pieces were starting to fall into place.

Curiously, Vibewire seemed less representative of an online community of young creative people than I recall. EngageMedia will no doubt become the host platform for Homeland videos and SlumTV demonstrates what is possible when a clear framework is provided up front! SlumTV make no bones about what they do. They teach kids in slums how to make videos and screen them.

The next step was to ensure we could get a website up and running quickly – a site that would be easy to use, a site that supported not only the Karen’s vision, but a collaborative environment from which videos can be produced from. I showed them through WordPress and got their lead web person, Friday, to set up a free WordPress blog and Karen TV was born! It is but a humble beginning…

By the end of the workshop we had everyone signed up as contributors. We covered some basic publishing techniques in WordPress, found a design template everyone was happy with and put together a small production team to re-design a header image.

It was a terrific outcome.

We have momentum!

I left the Melbourne Multicultural Hub, wandered up to a Korean grocery store, picked up some supplies for dinner and walked home in the rain. 

—

Photo: A Karen child from the village of Pilokkhi in Thailand near the Myanmar border. By Brian Adler, Public Domain, Wikipedia.

I am in the midst of juggling several productions again. We have a series of mirco-docs on the go and about to enter a second production and post-production phase, live performances that draw in part from the micro-docs series, further development of a touring exhibition / installation series, a couple of short films simmering on the horizon, a requiem and another album of sorts.

Managing all these projects remotely presents one with significant challenges. For one, I can’t carry a white board with me nor can I draw on a production assistant with ready access to all the resources, networks and services I require.

Additionaly, all these projects are low budget and therefore entirely reliant on good will support, where possible, and a suite of free and open software from which to manage and drive these projects with.

Project management tools are often cumbersome, come with features that one may never use and require far too much time to maintain. In some instances, you need a project manager just to keep these tools fed! It defeats the purpose. You want tools that are easy to use, ensure efficiency of one’s projects, provide scope for shared access to them and interoperable with portable devices and platforms. 

Now-a-days I’m using a combination of:

• Openoffice (spreadsheets, script templates, etc.)
• Google documents
• dotProject
• MediaWiki

All great tools, but neither designed specifically for media arts, video / film production. Hence, I am now looking at the media production software, Celtx. The desktop application, available for all platforms, is free. The online studio, in where all resources can be shared, is subscription based charged monthly or annualy.

I’ve yet to make a decision to throw myself into this… my basic concerns are around asset and production management. I’m yet to be convinced Celtx can offer this. Besides, it’s not FOSS, but it’s affordable and appears to be created by media producers for media producers.

Perhaps my old fashioned production tracker spreadsheets will suffice in tandem with what appears to be a very sophisticated application.

Home Lands is a recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant. apc.au will be involved in a component of the research being one of the partners of the application to the ARC. We are very proud to be involved in this project and to have been part of a successful ARC process.

What is Home Lands?

Home Lands is an internet television project made with entry level technical resources that connects refugee young people living in separated communities. Home Lands is underpinned by the premise that refugee youth resettlement is more successful if identification, communication and engagement is maintained with home communities.

Many young refugees struggle to develop positive cultural identities. The Home Lands project will explore the role that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play in connecting young refugees to their diasporic communities and demonstrate how this can assist them in developing positive social and cultural identities.

How will it work?

Separated production teams collaborate towards the creation of regular internet television programs that are then broadcast to communities at either end of this production spectrum and to other community members around the world. Preliminary stages of the project will see the use of Engage Media’s video distribution software and Creative Commons licensing, which may well form the basis of a dedicated media delivery platform in the future.

What has Home Lands done?

Over 2008, the Home Lands project has been in a research and development  phase, through funding from the City of Melbourne’s Community Cultural Development Program and VicHealth (Victoria’s peak health promotion body). The Home Lands project has recently been funded over three years by the Australian Research Council and will continue to receive funding from the City of Melbourne throughout this time. Substantial research on the impact of ICTs on refugee/transnational identities will be undertaken by Dr Sandy Gifford at the Refugee Health Research Centre, La Trobe University, as part of the project.

A Home Lands future and partnerships

So far, work has been undertaken with Karen (Burmese) and Sudanese young people in Melbourne and Karen young people on the Thai-Burma border. We are seeking additional funding to support the on-going activities and are looking for international partnerships to support the international aspects of the project’s development over the next three years – 2009-2011 – in Thailand, Southern Sudan, Egypt and other Diaspora locations which could include Europe/USA/UK. Future phases of the project will see the introduction of other communities including Iraqi and Somali.

It is the intention of the Home Lands project that it becomes a sustainable resource to provide for on-going connection between separated communities around the world.

We are in the midst of researching options towards a tool that maps arts events and activities in Victoria for people with disabilities. Options are:

• Create a unique customised tool;
• Implement custom features using off-the-shelf and open source tools;
• Utilise existing tools and services and aggregate them into a single website.

Personally, I’m keen on the third option. It’s the least expensive and wouldn’t require users to learn a new interface. As such, I’m looking at Google Maps and how this can be integrated into a simple web application for both search and data entry.

Unaware I was being video-taped, I was amused to find my talk at the DIY Video track at iSummit up on YouTube… this piece includes other presentations which were all quite amazing in fact!

We have worked with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Creative Commons Clinic (CC Clinic) since its inception on a number of adventurous projects. Most notably were the two Open Channel Video Slam rights management workshops produced for Arts Law Week 2007 and 2008. Created in association with the CC Clinic and Horse Bazaar, the Video Slams explored the use of Creative Commons licenses in a real production environment, testing their application in a complex mix of re-use content from the world over.

Whether it was Video Slam or any other of the open content initiatives I have been involved with the Creative Commons Clinic have been an invaluable resource and encouragement to my team and I. We are entirely indebted to them for their tireless support and expertise.

Since the great server move of December 2007 podcasts on Secession Records had dropped off-line. After an agonising few months trying to address this problem, amidst all our other projects, we decided to re-host the entire collection… This meant creating a dedicated site for our Secession artists and re-directing the old RSS / podcast feed to the new one.

Thankfully, this was more grunt than technical wizardry, but all the huff and puffing has paid off.

If you’re new to Secession’s podcast, sign up with:

http://blog.secession-records.org/?feed=podcast

Asking the question, what is the commons? A random selection of iSummit 2008 participants, Sapporo, Japan. Two short samplers from the forth-coming micro-doc, Nailing The Commons.

Identifying the Information Commons #01 from andrew garton on Vimeo.

Nailing the Commons #02 from andrew garton on Vimeo.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia licence.