UNICEF-OLPC Story Jam New York

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Alex UA's picture
Start: 
2008-03-28 08:00 - 2008-03-30 17:00 US/Eastern
Event type: 
Drupalcamp or Regional Summit

I know that this event coincides with the NYC DrupalCamp, but if any of you are interested in helping One Laptop Per Child and UNICEF bring affordable and open-source technologies to the developing world, we could really use your help. If you decide to join, please indicate that you'd like to be part of "Team Drupal" on the registration page. If you have any questions please contact me using my contact page, or shoot me an e-mail.

UNICEF, the world's leading children's organization will be holding an open Storytelling Jam and Hackathon from Friday March 28 through Sunday March 30. The three-day event will be hosted at UNICEF's headquarters in Manhattan, NY.

The focus of this event is to build and implement free and open-source tools for collecting stories, as well as gathering and spreading the stories themselves. Work will be done on a variety of platforms, from mobile phones to the One Laptop per Child's XO machine.

UNICEF is inviting software and hardware experts of all types to create tools that enable young people to capture and share their stories on various hardware devices including the XO. UNICEF's Youth Section has been actively involved in developing various projects in this area, including a radio station on a USB stick, software to allow people to access web pages through SMS / Text messages, and ways to capture the voices of young people through their mobile phones. Developers will be working in groups to either extend existing programs or create new ones. Check the projects page to see a list of proposed projects or propose one of your own. In addition to a viewing for the attendees on Sunday the 30th, Monday the 31st will feature a public viewing at UNICEF HQ where work from the weekend will be displayed and visitors will be able to record their stories.

Some suggested projects are here. UNICEF and partners have been working on developing these open-source tools for the last 8 months, and would like to extend and finalize them during this Jam.

Register Here or to view more information, including how you or your group can participate, see http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Story_Jam_New_York.

Hope some of you can make it! If not I hope to see some of you at DrupalCamp on Sunday!

Comments

More about "Our Stories"

Alex UA's picture

http://x.mepemepe.com/wiki/Our_Stories

Our Stories is an unprecedented collaborative project that leverages new digital technologies to help capture and preserve individual stories from around the world, online. The One Laptop Per Child Foundation, UNICEF, Google and StoryCorps have been working to build a framework that allows for international dialogue between civilizations and cultures.

Using mobile phones, computers and radio recording devices, young people record and upload audio stories, which then are accessible through a Google maps interface – allowing anyone to watch as new entries appear, and listen to the stories. This idea allows space for growing communities and building global consensus.

The goal of the Our Stories project is to capture, preserve, and share online 5 million personal stories and oral histories from cultures around the world by the year 2010. It is believed that such stories will not only foster an increased awareness of our shared humanity across borders and cultures, but will also preserve for posterity a record of our voices for generations to come.

In time, Our Stories will link to a multitude of oral history projects and sites, creating a universal network of stories that anyone can access, and that will serve as an invaluable educational resource bank for writers, journalists, historians, and scholars. Our Stories will also link to the more expansive UNIWiki project at UNICEF, which will extend the efforts in valuable additional directions by adding methods for children to interact via mobile phone and video

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

News content for OLPC

vineet-gdo's picture

I work for a company called Daylife that is an online news company that provides a free API platform and widgets for news content (articles and photos)....We have a news aggregation and analysis platform to collect data. And a site http://daylife.com and an API http://developer.daylife.com to finally retrieve and display that data.

I would want to do some kind of application for the Story Jam New York Projects. We have built news headlines module earlier and you can see one of our partners using it on http://comminit.com/ to get headlines about poverty alleviation in their right nav.

Any suggestions how I can get involved from a news content provider (through an API) and perspective.

drupal based?

ericG's picture

is this story telling project drupal based? the post does not make that clear.

Yes and No

Alex UA's picture

The main site is not using Drupal, but the program will almost certainly be using Drupal for certain aspects of the campaign, which is what "Team Drupal" will be doing on Friday and Saturday.

Also- my colleagues at UNICEF, the UNICEF Innovations Team, are very much committed to Drupal, and we are now using it for a large number of their upcoming projects. If we show them that this is the technology they should use for one aspect or another of this campaign, I promise you, they are more than open to using it.

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology

re: drupal based?

jasonwhat's picture

Good question Eric. The short answer is, "No, it is not drupal based." The longer answer is that Our Stories is merely seeking clever ways to use technology to collect voices from around the world. So far that has included using media wiki, mobile phones, radio, land lines, and more. It is up to the Drupal community to come up with our own drupal based platform for collecting and/or sharing stories. The Unicef innovations team and Olpc are open to seeing how Drupal might enhance that, whether it is through running it on local mesh networks, on other low-cost laptops like the classmate, on a usb stick, whatever.