Innovative Programs

For the most part, and with only a little tweaking, these project descriptions have been pulled off of their respective websites.

Murmur
http://murmurtoronto.ca
[murmur] is an archival audio project that collects and curates stories set in specific Toronto locations. At each of these locations, a [murmur] sign will mark the availability of a story with a telephone number and location code. By using a mobile phone, users are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the full physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze.

Urban Tapestries
http://urbantapestries.net
Urban Tapestries is a Proboscis project exploring social and cultural uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies through transdisciplinary research. To help us model emerging social and cultural behaviours we have built an experimental platform that allows people to author and access place-based content (text, audio and pictures). The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community's collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. It is a framework for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples' presence in the geography of the city.

City Stories
http://www.citystories.com
City Stories rest upon an idea called city-based storytelling. It's halfway between a personal journal and a travel book. It's when you tell the stories of your life, and the city itself becomes a key character. It's a long, winding love story to the city you live in. It's personal, true stories about what it's like to be who you are, and live where you live, where the city itself becomes a character in your story. Started by Derek Powazek, SF Stories was his long love letter to San Francisco. There are now city-based storytelling sites all over the world. San Francisco, Edmonton, San Diego, Cincinnati, Miami, Manila, Casale in Italy, Dublin, Nijmegen in the Netherlands...and so many others. The website tagline says it all."

Capture Wales
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/capturewales/
BBC Wales is working with digital storyteller Daniel Meadows from the Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University. They run monthly workshops around Wales, working with members of the public to help them create their own digital stories. The Capture Wales project reflects the range of people, places, stories that is Wales today.

StoryLink
http://www.storylink.org/
In its beta phase, StoryLink 1.0 is an online community for digital stories that will allow members of the site to store, search for, and save digital stories; embed personal reflections to their stories; attach feedback and resources to each digital story; and communicate with other Web site members about issues raised in the stories. The site is primarily programmed in HTML and JavaScript. The Stories sections is powered by a beta MySQL database. Usability testing is currently underway in four communities throughout the country. We anticipate a full launch in the summer of 2004. StoryLink 1.0 is funded by the Waitt Family Foundation and is a joint project of the Center for Reflective Community Practice at MIT, Invent Media, and Third World Majority.