Recently a number of opinion pieces were written for the Australia Council for the Arts on the subject of developing protocol for using digital media in communities. This is a slightly longer version of the article written by our Director, Shakthi Sivanathan. Read the full selection of provoking thought pieces here.

At the turn of the millennium,the World Bank interviewed 60,000 people who lived on less than a dollar a day. They were asked to define the biggest barrier to breaking down their own disadvantage. Beyond food and water, they defined the most significant barrier as not having a voice. The need for a capacity to express their own story of building dignity and opportunity was as important as the act itself.

At the turn of the new millennium we also had the rise of a new medium for storytelling. It offered the lowest ever barriers for telling your story artfully, powerfully and sustainably. This medium will become the main way that people will produce, share and receive stories in the future – and we still have the opportunity to carve out significant space in it. Indeed, for community artists, digital media offers up the chance to facilitate stories from the margins of our society that not only build opportunity and social change for the communities involved, but funnel the power of those stories to transform the systems in the centre.

Yet despite the opportunity this potential remains largely untapped. Many past approaches to utilising digital media in communities have had flaws that limit their success. Some mediate the outcomes too heavily and fail to facilitate art that represents the insider’s view of the community. Others supply equipment, but do not build the capacity of communities to use that infrastructure for the long-term. Many commit to ongoing sets of workshops that unfortunately leave behind few long-term skills or a passion for learning. We struggle to facilitate professional or innovative artistic outcomes.

The issue here is broader than our own industry. Whilst radio took 50 years and television 20 years to reach an audience of 20 million, it took Facebook 2 years. The internet is still a baby – but like Godzilla, one that is making terrifying strides in its early years. Spam, Wikileaks, Justin Beiber, SMS bullying, Egypt, LOLcats, Skyping an overseas family member, getting fired on Facebook. It feels like digital technology has a hold on us; not the other way around.

At CuriousWorks we’ve been developing a best practice model for utilising digital media in communities that addresses these flaws and fully leverages its latent potential. Since 2007 we’ve been working intensively in Western Sydney and the Western Desert (we wanted to ensure that our model could work equally well in starkly different environments). We have to come to focus on capacity building, community ownership, professionalism and sustainability. Our model centres on a knowledge transfer system and is implemented from the grassroots up, over the long-term.

These are the some of the qualities of the model that we have found crucial to its success thus far.

Early on in a project, we help the community define themselves the stories they want to tell. They need to know why they’re telling them, for whom and what they expect as a result. We’ve found this nurturing of responsibility for storytelling and literacy around media and digital communications is the only way to leave a truly lasting impact. Through this we also get a sense of the community’s digital infrastructure needs, and can quietly start designing a platform that meets those needs.

Our belief is that if people have the ability to powerfully and sustainably represent their community, they can influence their local public institutions as a result. In 2010 we trained a group from Penrith, Greater Western Sydney, to make compelling stories on whatever technology they already had; mobiles phones, old cameras, the computers at the public library. They then uploaded that content onto an online map of Penrith. Stories aligned with the different groups council was consulting with in order to build their Neighbourhood Action Plan. In this way, the community had direct influence on a document with significant impact on the future of their neighbourhood. Crucially, counsellors had to formally reply to the map and the plan in their council meetings.

In Newman, remote WA, we were about to start a major project based out of their youth centre when it closed down. The kids we ended up working with desperately wanted it opened again. We simultaneously followed two paths: our partnerships and base to the schools in town, and training the cultural leaders more intensively to campaign through digital media for their youth centre to be re-opened.

Now, almost two years later, our model has been embedded into the school curriculum and teachers and young leaders are being trained to replace us as the facilitators in the community. In some instances, a group of 10-12 year olds are training the teachers in digital media skills. The community will be hosting their own, annual local film festival and the youth centre has been re-opened, bigger and better than ever.

Sometimes people seek to influence not their own community but “the public”. This part of our model centres on empowering cultural leaders to create professional-level art for the consumption of mainstream Australia, distributed through the internet as well as traditional media forms. An example of this is Villawood Mums: a story about two mums’ very different experiences of Villawood Detention Centre that subtly shows how the implementation of our refugee policy has significantly changed over the last ten years. The trick here is to make art that is accessible – after all, everyone has a mum.

Here’s one comment someone posted about the story on Facebook:

I watched ‘Villawood Mums’ last month and have a story to share; a 70yr old church attendee kept saying that ‘refugees were well looked after, people in detention centres were always lucky to be on Australian soil , she couldn’t understand what the fuss was about all those people on the roofs of the detention centres.’ After watching “Villawood Mums” that lady understood that she didn’t have recent information … she decided to go visit the new arrivals.

The story has also been circulated amongst the staff of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

Since these cultural leaders are capable of producing professional level media, there is another avenue available to them for sustainability: the creative industries. So we’ve been training them in small business skills, facilitating them taking on client jobs for media production and putting the surplus back into giving their community a voice. It’s a new kind of professional pathway that bridges small business and charity, the creative industries and art; the same bridge that CuriousWorks itself forms through its existence.

The final piece in the puzzle for CuriousWorks is to leverage the Internet as a medium for bringing together the network of communities and cultural leaders we work with. We’ve built a safe social media portal where they can connect with each other and share stories, knowledge and values from opposite sides of the continent. We’ve built an online toolkit with lesson plans that cultural leaders around the world are using to implement our model in their own ways. And the more communities we work with, the more the value of that combined knowledge and network grows.

We’re too young a company to be sure just yet, but our hope is that over the next few years, the triangle of schools, councils and cultural leaders in each region we’re working in will actually make us redundant. We hope that they will completely take over the model and run it the way that they have decided it works best for themselves and in their community. In this spirit, I’ll leave you with an insight gleaned from one of our community collaborators in Roebourne, remote WA:

We have many visitors come here, all with projects, investments, and ideas for our future… all the grand plans. But once in a while we get visitors who contribute some happiness and joy, and add to the social fabric that is already here. When that happens the community responds with precious gifts, of knowledge, of history – and most importantly we make a connection with our visitors.

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The award is given by the Australia Council for the Arts annually, for the achievements of young Australian artists working with communities to produce art about social issues. Shakthi received the award in recognition of his direction of CuriousWorks since founding the company in 2005.

It’s an honour to have the achievements of CuriousWorks recognised in this way – we’re thrilled!

Shakthi with Jeremy Smith, deputy chair of Community Partnerships Committee at Australia Council for the Arts.

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