Alan, Colin, Gregor, Jutta, James, Liam

Juliana sends regrets (poor conference hotel wi-fi) and the following update via Slack: "We are adjusting the work plan with the new information that Jutta sent to us about the budget, and I will put together, as soon as I came back to Colombia, the documents that Jess required in her last email."

Introducing Gregor

Gregor Moss is a new developer at the IDRC who's been working with Alan on the web storytelling tools described at Web Storytelling Tools

Storytelling Tool Discussion

• COLIN gave an introduction on this theme

  • expressing creatively within a community is a prerequisite for participation in the community
  • we still have problems getting stories on the web - information about our emerging groups
    • choice between expensive / technically complex & popular but proprietary platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)

• JAMES: do we want to test tools with youth?

  • COLIN: yes! even if very sketchy; we need to surface needed features like translation and localization
  • JAMES: from the African perspective, storytelling was a way in which different generations passed on knowledge, history
    • "when you tell someone to tell a story, they will be free"
      • a tool to bring the voices at the margins to the centre
      • environmental facilitators
        • "when you look at the subject of exclusion"
        • "it's not just because of personality that we can't participate, but because of the existing environment"
        • trying to work both on environment (platforms, facilitating communication)
        • an environmental facilitator fixes a mismatch

• ALAN: what other things should this tool have?

  • LIAM: one of the pieces we had thought about working on was video storytelling - adding that functionality would be useful?
    • ALAN: absolutely!
  • JUTTA: scaffolds for text such as grammar, spellchecking, glossaries
    • COLIN: we expect to provide this via UIO+ and other means; we anticipate having sound, video, other means in addition to text
      • fall back to supporting low bandwidth / mobile browsers / media
  • JUTTA: will we get into co-construction of stories; multiple authors, adding components, collaborative authoring
    • COLIN: this would be huge - different perspectives
  • JUTTA: would be good to collaborate with the Rhebus work we're doing for FLOE; annotation, collaboration, etc
  • JAMES: if someone can't write, what about drawing or sketching stories? Different options for telling a story.
    • trying to put the story into visual explanation - easier to understand?
    • ALAN: so maybe things like simplification, summary, rendition from picture symbols....

• COLIN: can we set up a way to access this so others can try it? Maybe on the build site?

• JUTTA: can we engage youth with learning differences as co-designers of the interface via David Perrera's hackathons or TIG?

  • ALAN will reach out to David about this

• JAMES: will be working with youth groups in Rwanda in September/October, could test tools for feedback then

  • JUTTA: idea here would be to actually engage youth at this stage in trying out and using the designs
    • JAMES: trying to understand environment, how they interact with it

Budgets

We'll continue email contact regarding these.