apc.au blog

It was 20 years ago come this May when the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) was founded. Although the name and principles by which it was established were nutted out a couple of years earlier, the formalisation of what has been a journey of ground-breaking efforts across the globe, took a little longer to swing into place.

This May I will be meeting with other members of the APC board nearby the Sterkfontein Caves, about an hour or so from Johannesburg, South Africa. Part of this meeting will put in place some of the activities that will see all members of the APC come together in November to celebrate our achievements and the road ahead.

It took some doing – media releases, trips to Canberra, the efforts of many, the incredibly focused efforts of a hand-full, community awareness programs and mighty media campaigns – the efforts paid off! Community television in Australia has a future on the digital spectrum. And it’s official!

The big question now is, what do we do there that hasn’t been done before, that ensures the viability of a television broadcaster in the face of increased bandwidth and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet?

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!

We’re well into 2009 and the pace has yet to let up as we steer through a micro-documentary series, open content and social networking consultancies, a fusion cabaret and IT project management contracts.

Grant has been providing technical project management to a number of companies around Melbourne. This includes working with digital agencies and multimedia graphics groups to produce a number of projects ranging from animated billboards to campaign based web sites.

He’s also been working with a company supplying insulation products for houses as part of a government backed energy reduction program.

Other projects have taken Andrew to Cape Town, the forests of the Ulu Baram in Sarawak, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur and more recently, an arts community in the Australian bush, Dunmoochin.

Not enough information? More time on your hands than you ever expected? Here’s yet another way you can keep tabs on what we’re up to. Find us on twitter @apcau. You’ll be so glad you did!

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.

It’s been near on two years since we re-traced our steps, down-scaled and re-emerged with our skills, intuative knowledge and passion for a secure and fun future. With that in mind Grant and I have taken the bold step towards a strategic plan, drawing on our dreams and aspirations and 20 years in the IT and social media / computer communications business.

In the spirit of openness, we share with you the bare bones of our vision, mission and objectives… keeping in mind there is still much work to be done. But we are stoked with having come up with a description of what it is we do, where we came from, and amazingly, vision and mission statements in a single sitting!

• Draft apc.au Strategic Plan

Thanks to Ian for a sensational massage this afternoon, which we were both treated to, that set the mood for clarity, focus and diligence… the pizza and beers helped to!

Micro-docs series produced by apc.au / Toy Satellite in association with Rengah Sarawak seeks your support to assist us in its completion.

Sarawak Gone explores four remote Bidayuh communities accessible by foot within an hour’s drive from Kuching, capital city of Sarawak, Malaysia.

Sarawak Gone explores four remote Bidayuh communities accessible by foot within an hour’s drive from Kuching, capital city of Sarawak, Malaysia. They will lose their livelihood, traditional lands and culture, their rights and heritage with the development of the controversial Bengoh Dam project.

Sarawak Gone is a micro docs series produced on location with residents of the Bidayuh communities.

The series is intended to raise awareness to the denigration of the rapidly dwindling societies on the island of Borneo, the native land titles at stake and the rapidly decreasing habitats for protected and endangered flora and fauna.

Micro-docs are short, 5 – 10 minute documentaries designed for online distribution, portable media devices and laptop screening events.

apc.au is seeking support by way of financial and equipment donations, in-kind post-production support and assistance in screening and distribution opportunities. Equipment donations (e.g. cameras, tripods, computers, external hard disk drives) would be left in Sarawak to assist in the establishment of a media resource centre in Kuching.

If you can assist in the completion of this new work contact apc.au or donate via PayPal.

Sarawak Gone is an apc.au / Toy Satellite production in association with Rengah Sarawak.

Given our end of year schedules Grant and I decided we would write to you in the new year at a time when we ought to be reflecting on what had transpired with an optimistic view towards the future… It is regrettable that the year has begun with yet more international travesties.

Regardless, we still send you all hearty greetings and best wishes for what we hope will be the year we all make a difference to the world, personally and beyond.

We would also like to thank you sincerely for your support to the projects and initiatives we have contributed to throughout 2008. If you have a moment, we would like discuss in brief some of the changes we had undertaken and achievements of 2008.

apc.au a virtual company

You may have noticed that we began publishing the description of our APC acronym. Although founded in 1997, in 2005 we re-focused ourselves on our core entity, apc.au. Since then we had decommissioned c2o (Community Communications Online), begun the task of archiving Toy Satellite’s first decade and revamping our publishing company, Secession Records.

More recently we undertook the clarification of our primary apc.au function to Advisory, Production, Commons Australia which was quietly launched in 2008, our 11th year.

apc.au a commons company

We are also very proud to announce that apc.au now operates as one of Australia’s first fully commons-based, and entirely virtual companies. In short, it means we govern our business in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.

apc.au has been guided and motivated in part by a broad commons-based agenda, more recently defined through an emerging commons-based sector that seeks to literally unleash diversity, creativity and energy from the ground-up.

This can be best defined by author and scholar, David Bollier:

The commons is a new way to express a very old idea – that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the good of all. The commons are the things that we inherit and create jointly, and that will (hopefully) last for generations to come.

The commons consists of gifts of nature such as air, water, the oceans, wildlife and wilderness, and shared assets like the Internet, the airwaves used for broadcasting, and public lands. The commons also includes our shared social creations: libraries, parks, public spaces as well as scientific research, creative works and public knowledge that have accumulated over centuries.

apc.au achievements in 2008

In our first full year as a virtual organisation we have worked on projects in Cape Town, Nairobi, Istanbul, Sarawak, Osaka and Tokyo and I am currently writing to you from the small gothic city of Graz, Austria, where we have worked on installations and radio drama / documentaries exploring commons themes such as forest communities and loss of native title, depression and anxiety and open rights management.

Projects have ranged from research for the internet video series Home Lands, production on the Sarawak Gone micro-docs, hosting Video Slam at Arts Law Week 2008, video production and presentations at the iCommons iSummit, participation in the first Growing an Australian Commons conference and the Open Spectrum Australia symposium, Quality / Control.

• http://wiki.apc.org.au/

Our record label, Secession Records, also released my “5 year in the making” album, Son of Science.

• http://secession-records.org/releases/

We have been inspired to have worked on some incredible projects this year. Very special thanks to all the people at Cultural Development Network and City of Melbourne, our colleagues at Open Spectrum Australia, Arts Law Consortium, Creative Commons Clinic and members of the Association for Progressive Communications.

We have participated in an ever increasing range of “commons” related activities and advisories, providing commons-based solutions to open publishing and rights management, from video production to web 2.0 implementations within the cultural development sectors.

I could take up another few screen pages on all the in-between projects and activities, but I won’t. I will, however, encourage you to visit our wikis and blogs, let us know what you’re doing and what we may be able to assist you with in the coming year.

• http://wiki.apc.org.au/
• http://secession-records.org/
• http://podcast.secession-records.org/

Support Sarawak Gone

And finally, a very special request… in February 2009 we will be hosting a fund-raiser to assist in pulling resources together to complete the Sarawak Gone micro-docs series and to also contribute to a second shoot in the region.

We are calling for donations to assist us in this project should you have any interest or capacity to do so, we would be very grateful.

Donations may be made via PayPal on either:

• http://wiki.apc.org.au/index.php?title=Sarawak_Gone
• http://rengah.c2o.org

All the very best from the “open”, friendly and entirely uncommon team at apc.au…

Andrew Garton & Grant McHerron