Our Stories

english | 한국어

HowTo [ID# 49193]  +/-

About

Our Stories is a joint project involving OLPC, UNICEF, Google, and Story Corps to facilitate children telling their own stories and those of their communities around the world. The basic format will be 3-5 minute audio recordings with geodata, and optional text and images; these will be visualized on maps of the world, and shared publicly over local and global networks.

The Story Corps team are advising on modifications to their recommended process for interviewing a friend or loved one that will work for a young audience of interviewers; the idea is to localize the process and surrounding projects, and to carry out class activities around such interviews in OLPC partner countries. The project hopes to have 1 million stories, and to have a third of all XO owners to have recorded a story, by the end of the first year.

Google engineers are starting to work on the project as of late May, and a draft proposal outlines six initial countries [Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ethiopia] and interface sketches.

Questions to answer include:

• how to get recording tools to children across the country
• how to develop localized activities around interviewing and recording others, and around reading the stories of others
• how to spread the word; introducing children, parents, and other teachers to the ideas behind the project and ways to upload and share recorded stories; building networks of Our Stories participants and broadcasters; providing posters about the project to telecenters and radio stations

Status and Goals

From the most recent Google project lead discussion:

• Content editing for interview guides and website
• Team leads for country networks
• Engineering: can use the Platypus infra to host audio files

One person working on front-end of website

2 folks with XOs who want to work with OLPC

The Activity: symbolic interface w/ 3 symbols: record, play [and search], upload

The Nitty Gritty

Tech notes

Send use case docs around

ogg and mp3 available everywhere.

Homepage

2 sections on the homepage:

1. who the partners are and contributors
2. interview guides and content

"olpc" and storycorps and other site.

--> built, hosted, &c on google.com infra. private labels elsewhere?

Someone from earth-maps outreach; working in july, at least committing to get storycorps stories online. Not huge incremental additional effort to put all uga, pak, bra likewise. Note difference between google maps and google earth; later requires fat client.

Nigeria call update

Some followup call with the ministries; across unicef nigeria and olpc nigeria?

unicef wanted some equal targeting of 6 geopolitical zones. this is a reason to find alternatives ---> question re: resource allocation to pda activities.

four languages [ibo, hausa, yoruba, english]

l10n/i18n capability : G! have folks ready to help.

dump things into OLPC first. turnaround and validation.

discover $ cost; trans agency might split the cost.

Website meeting: Plan sth for early next week. what does the interface and arch look like?

Rough deadlines:

July 15 - mockup from engineering (zahed, frankie c. doing coord)

July 21 - all content (abi dhaba? site designer; oolas doing website; rota, webmaster for .org as well for standards)

Aug 1 - draft

Aug 15 - submitted to translation

project plan map -- content and eng side, with a content map.

(maiko) doing non-eng, (phil farhi) doing project across all.

People

Brouna - country lead brasil

Nataile - s.c. admin

Maiko - non-end coord

Daisuke - came to first meeting, cf maiko

Rota - web grp

Jed? - country lead Nig; Katherine is the other, from OS team

Allie - editorial

John - eng, voice recorder on XO

Heather - editorial, site & teacher content

Jen Liu - work with Stephanie, Uruguay

Laura - editorial, work with Holly

Holly - editorial

Stephen

Jane - country lead for Arg

Chris - Apps team, Arg lead

Sarah - Rwanda country lead, l10n coord

Shyam? - not there

Phil Farhi - proj coord (not there)

restricted access / content policing -- youtube has human/monetary efforts. jamendo much smaller... with community efforts.

john: website launch team needs traffic ideas, are a bit wary that they just offered to let millions of people upload audio of arbitrary length to a central site, and want estimates of peak upload / visitation traffic.