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Nomads Digitised, Abuses Communicated
The Economist published a special report on digital nomads that includes contributions from colleagues and peers. The future perfectesque addition comes the form of a phone-in diary of life on the road (hosted on the economist site here) that spanned a week in Tokyo and Seattle.
In situations where we need to collect data, where it's inappropriate to be present in person we sometimes ask people to self-document their lives in the form of audio-visual diaries. From experience the results of self documentation can be a bit hit or miss, with participants often deciding to re-interpret the boundaries of the study on the fly, but when it works the results can be powerful. Whilst I prefer to be on the other side of the microphone/lens the use of Dropio to record voice mail messages was pretty painless and hei, its not as if I had to be asked to take photos. Is self-documentation appropriate for your study? Judge for yourself:
Abuses archived? Putting self documentation in the context this week's Global Philanthropy Forum take a look at Witness / The Hub - a participatory media site for bringing human rights abuses to a worldwide audience. And if there's any of our Ovi guys reading this ...
Writing from San Francisco | April 12, 2008 | Permalink
Comments
very nice site. I said it before and I say it now - GO ON with this site! Your website is very important for a whole continued!
Posted by: glen kabul music at April 13, 2008 7:00 AM
Great post! As a service designer, we sometimes use self documentation to uncover latent needs and gather insights. But you are right, it's kind of a trial and error thing, as you never know what's coming out of the other end.
:-)
Posted by: Erick at April 13, 2008 5:21 PM
Dear Jan,
some of us here at WITNESS have been following your blog and lots of us have read the NY Times Magazine article. We're very much interested in the use of cellphones by human rights activists. Very soon the Hub will allow users to upload footage directly from cellphones to the site. As we are also concerned with the safety and security of people who upload footage as well as those who are depicted in footage- would love to know what you or others are working on with regards to anonymous media messaging or things in that field.
thanks for the link to the Hub!
Posted by: Matisse at April 15, 2008 3:17 AM
Hei Matisse, there's no straightforward answer to this - will take the reply offline.
Posted by: Jan at April 17, 2008 5:41 AM