For the last few months I’ve been meeting with a team of folks, Todd Sieling & Tylor Sherman of Denim & Steel, and John Wellwood of Echo Memoirs on how to better accomplish story telling in the digital format, to still have as much purpose and engagement as the traditional person-to-person storytelling methods. Our small group grew out of the “Forum: John Wellwood and the Art of Storytelling”, that was held back in mid-January, hosted by Todd and Tylor.
Since meeting up post forum, each of us had our own ideas to contribute on ideas or needs for better digital story telling, from personalizing storytelling for the elderly with Alzheimer’s to non-profit organizations, and there seemed to be many possibilities and also unknowns. The multiple discussion sessions has since then converged into looking at putting together a Digital Story ‘Camp’ or Unconference. We wanted to open up the discussion, and get the community out to participate and collaborate, and hopefully we all can help to innovate in digital storrytelling. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Camps or Unconferences, here’s a little background info to explain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BarCamp
We want to see what this unconference brings in it’s organic process, to open the discussion on digital tools, needs, experiences, inviting both the digital and analog community of creative folks, to see what can come out of this collective collaboration. Whether this means developing apps or ideas in social media, or new ways of communication or just generating creative thinking, this is up to the participants who attend.
Would you be interested in sharing your creativity and lending a hand to help getting this event off the ground? What kind of commitment is involved? Well, we need volunteers to join us in putting the event together, event day hosts/hostesses, attendees (whether as session pitchers or just joining in for the discussion), various sponsors, and event clean up.
Tentative date is for June 23, 2012, depending on venue availability. Upon finding enough members to join in the project, we can further solidify plans.
Drop me a line if you are interested in anyway, we’d love to include you! Feel free to ask any question.
Cheers!
Kai
p.s. In case you’re wondering what you might choose to pitch, to give you an idea, my possible personal pitch idea would be: how we might use a form of digital storytelling to raise awareness for elderly folks with dementia and alzheimers, and ultimately to gain more engagement between all parties involved, from care personnel to patient, to family members. Putting a human face to elderly who can no longer communicate may help in the level of care and engagement from everyone involved, thus adding to their quality of life.