moosecamp+2007+ideas

Web 2.0 Storytelling Tools and the art of the Remix
So, the idea here is to riff on a few pieces that a couple of my hoped for co-conspirators have been doing over the past year.

The first is Alan's very cool work on 50 ways to tell a story. The second is Brian (and other's) work on [|Mashups] (as well as remixes, which I'm not sure why but seems to me to have been lost in the shuffle of useful music metaphors).

So one idea I had was for someone to write a story using one of these storytelling tools, and then for each of the subsequent participants to remix that tale, using one of the different tools, not only telling it in a different tool but adding to it, mashing it up with their own tale or their own 'take' on the tale.

Much like Alan's experiment with the '50 ways' one of the aims would be to demonstrate a few different web 2.0 storytelling tools for the audience.

But in addition, aspects of - free content/creative commons etc - mashups and remixes - collaborative production - ? would be engaged.

Other variations or ways to frame this could be a play on the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse or something along the lines of Kurosawa's famous [|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_(film)] ('same' story, different perspectives)

Other ideas? Story ideas? Something about blogging (since it is ostensibly a blogging conference)? "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Software"?

Alan is quite honored by the idea and eager to put some new spins on this. A few unorganized thoughts:
 * Many, including myself, tend to get tool and feature focused, and skip over the important steps of knowing how to create an effective story; or how to communicate in images, metaphor, etc. For example, besides 3 travel photos, the 17 images in my Dominoe story were actually from contexts, events, times not related to the story itself. The flickr telling a story in 5 images of 6 words are good basic exercises in this area. The story creating part is not one I am deep in expertise- will be great to have people like Bryan Alexander and/or Barbara Ganley present who teach/have taught this stuff (I am a poser).
 * I like the remix idea. The 50 tools do allow you to remix/re-use media (images, audio, video, text)... so one approach would be to provide a set of media to work from, and see how many ways they can be creatively mixed to render a story. OR-- perhaps even make this a 2 slot session. The first session would be given a story (basic 5 element storyline??) charged with locating media to bring it to life; either locate cc licensed media or go out and create/post original media (tagging appropriately). A second session slot would be charged with building stories out of the media. Or, as you suggest this might be orchestrated in teams.
 * If participants are to create a story, we need to think of something that can take place in the setting of the conference, assuming it is at UBC, so the venue itself, or the conference, or the people there, can be characters or scenery
 * Mashups/remixes are a bit more challenging to "teach", but I'd be eager to hear the Mixmaster DJ Lamb;'s ideas- are there some basic skills people can learn with free tools- ccMixter? Jumpcut can do a lot, along with a few other in my 50 pile.

Oh man, I totally love some of these suggestions. I totally would love to make this more hands on, and the idea of giving people a stock of media to retell a story is SO appealing. The challenges I think are:
 * our experience last year was that there are a LOT of competing sessions at Moosecamp. A session like this would take mnimum 2 hours. Asking people to forsake other sessions for this one for 2 hours is asking a lot
 * same goes for ourselves - I am totally down with doing a longer session, but it also means us missing out potentially on other good stuff. Ideas???

Story Ideas
 * **Dr**. Spacebook or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Web 2.0
 * a personal account of the points at which one came to 'get' Web 2.0
 * A funny thing happened to me on the way to Northern Voice...
 * taking Alan's idea above about incorporating the venue and event into the story; would be cool to reuse the NV flickr feed for photos and the NV RSS feed for posts