The first presentation was by Jacob Colker and titled Mobile Web For Good. This was a very interesting look at how mobile devices are already being used to help promote social change and activism and how mobile technology will change the way organizations will reach large groups in the future. Jacob gave us several interesting examples of websites where mobile is being used for good. Here are some sites that are worth checking out...
www.mobileactive.com
www.ushahidi.com
www.ireport.com
www.txteagle.com
www.frontlinesms.com
www.theextraordinaries.org
The last website is Colker's own project where anyone with a mobile device can take part in completing microtasks and microvolunteering in their spare time. A boiled down description from The Extraordinaries website-- Our Theory of Change: Americans have spare time – billions of hours – but in small windows of idle moments: sitting in an airport, waiting in a doctor’s office, riding the bus to work, and more. If we can reach people during these spare moments we harness a huge pool of untapped human energy.-- so by reaching these people on their mobile device they can do a simple task during one of these idle moments like transcribe a few words of a subtitle for a human rights video. Add all the idle moments together and the whole film gets subtitled in no time. The idea of harnessing large groups of people to take action using a mobile device certainly had us all thinking of how this can translate to documentary marketing and distribution.
The second presentation was from Ken Eklund and Tony Walsh and was titled Changing The Game about how gaming projects are being built and utilized to help promote social issue documentaries. I'll admit, this is the one presentation that didn't hold a ton of interest for me...I'm not much of a gamer, but it still got me thinking-- a few interesting aspects...1.) Every social tool (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) has a gaming aspect to it and attracts certain people to this leadership board aspect (# of friends, # of followers, # of views). And in the end people participate in many of these social networks for the same reason they play games...the reward. Action = Reward is usually the engine that drives participation in many social circles.
The third and final presentation was titled The Future Of Social Networks and was a two-parter-- first Patrice O'Neill showed how she built a national movement-- www.niot.org -- to help communities fight against hate crimes, around her film Not In Our Town. This was a very impressive example of not just having a website to promote your film, but to really create a stand alone site and movement that takes off and becomes its own successful entity. This is really what the BAVC Producers Institute is all about, and what we hope to do ourselves this week. Patrice did just that two years ago, when she developed the prototype for www.niot.org at the very first BAVC Producers Institute.
And finally, Evan Goldin from Ning.com gave is a look at the website that allows you to build your own social network to find/reach audiences with similar interests. Having already explored Ning and developed a Ning site for "The Way We Get By" a few months ago, I was familiar with the basics of the website. What I found most interetsing was how much your Ning page could be customized. It seems Ning may be a great alternative to filmmakers hoping to create a clean, easy to use, classy looking website for their film, with just a small amount of money needed to pay a web designer to customize your Ning page. We'll certainly be thinking about that in the early stages of our next film.
Next up...we finally get to work on our projects!! Updates and blogging to follow...
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