New publication – Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust

S. Copeland and A. de Moor (2017). Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust. AI & Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-017-0744-1 (download preprint or read article online).

Abstract

Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented in community partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands.

 

The Tilburg story of knowledge sharing for social innovation

Last October, I gave an invited talk at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, USA. Topic of my talk was “Knowledge Sharing for Social Innovation: The Dutch Tilburg Regional Case”. I published the slides of my talk in a previous post. In the meantime, however, with the help of the good people of Rutgers’ IT staff, I worked on creating an indexed YouTube version of the video recording that was made of my presentation. In it, you can find the Tilburg story of knowledge sharing for social innovation. It contains the slides combined with my presenting them, plus a very lively Q&A with the audience afterwards. In this YouTube video, you can watch me tell the full story. Click here to get a larger version (handy for reading those crowded slides!).

If you want to jump to a particular topic, see the index below the video.

Jump to:

• Introduction
• Wicked Problems Abound
• Social Innovation
• Midden-Brabant: THE Dutch Social Innovation Region
• Transforming Education: Prins Heerlijk
• Transforming Healthcare: Into D’Mentia
• The Social Innovation Process
• Designing Case Conversations: Social Innovation Collaboration Model
• Collaboration Patterns: Capturing socio-technical Lessons Learnt
• Regional Social Innovation Ecosystem
• 2010: Regional Strategic SI Agenda (“10 km”)
• 2013: Catalyzing Social Innovation (“5 km”)
• Need for Better Knowledge Sharing: Catalyzing & Connecting Conversations
• Towards a Regional Knowledge Sharing Living Lab
• Pathfinders
• Social Innovation Award Academy
• European Social Innovation Week
• Storytelling Architecture
• Experiment: Tilburg University Language Center Students
• Storytelling Pattern: Student Assignments
• KnowledgeCloud
• The Internet: Information Tsunami
• KnowledgeCloud: Providing Regional Context
• KnowledgeCloud: Two Interlocking Conversation Dynamics
• KnowledgeWorkshops: Generating Focus, Trust, Commitment
• Knowledge Groups: Continuing the Conversations Online
• KnowledgeCloud Tags: Connecting Conversations Across Groups
• KnowledgeMakery: Providing Physical Conversation Spaces
• KnowledgeCloud: Taking Off
• Building Up the Living Lab: One Pattern at a Time
• Research Questions
• Conclusion
• Q&A 

Earlier, we identified the Tilburg region to be full of social innovations, but still being weak in the knowledge sharing about them. Hopefully, my talk is one of many, many more. Looking forward to learning about your own stories.

Knowledge Sharing for Social Innovation: The Dutch Tilburg Regional Case

On October 21st, I gave a guest lecture at Rutgers University, USA, having been invited by the Communication Department, the MCIS Program, and the Collaborative for Knowledge, Innovation and Design.  Below my slides. A video recording of my presentation, and an interview by the School of Communication and Information with my host, Mark Aakhus, are still to follow.

Download slides here

Abstract

Social innovation as a process is about multiple stakeholders working together on joint, economically and socially sustainable solutions for wicked societal problems. Social innovation both co-creates value for individual stakeholders involved, and contributes to the common good. It has been an important theme in the the Dutch city of Tilburg and the surrounding region of Midden-Brabant for years. A successful regional social innovation ecosystem exists. Knowledge sharing about the innovations remains a bottleneck, however. Two initiatives to increase regional social innovation knowledge sharing capacity are presented: the social innovation storytelling architecture and the Tilburg public library prototype KnowledgeCloud for catalyzing knowledge sharing across regional themes of interest.

Digital storytelling tools

I am currently attending an interesting session at the E-Campaigning Forum on digital storytelling. Stories are very powerful ways of motivating people to take action, to reflect on the implications of policies, to make abstract concepts concrete and so on.

In this age of Web 2.0 and user-created multimedia content, the old linear textual technologies for supporting storytelling like discussion forums are being complemented by a multitude of innovtive tools supporting new forms of content, interactivity and user involvement. Here are some telling examples of this new wave of tools. They still need to find their niche in the Internet landscape, but it is already becoming very clear that they provide powerful incentives for people to become more (inter)active and engaged.

• Animoto: automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
• Viddler:
  • Use webcam to record directly to website
  • Tag specific moment within video
  • Post comments to specific moments within the video
  • Have complete control over who sees video
• JibJab: allows one to put one’s face on video and share it.
• SproutBuilder: Sprout is a quick and easy way for beginner and pro users to create living content including websites, widgets, banners, videos, music, photos, RSS feeds, calendars and more.
• Living Cultural Storybases: Nurturing the oral heritage of minority cultures in a digital world.

Good reference source:

• NFP2: what happens when not-for-profits, social media and people meet