Hosted by Irwin Oostindie and April Smith from Fearless City Mobile out of DTES.
A quick bio on Fearless City Mobile: it's a DTES-based project trying to get local residents to use mobile technology to broadcast their world.
Irwin uses the word "storytelling" particularly to show what they'd like to see from citizen journalists regarding alternate perspectives.
With the city's promises to the DTES having been largely broken, citizen journalism according to Smith and Oostindie is important to make sure that the situation does not get out of hand.
They've helped train the civilian observers, and are taking things to a new level by wanting to encourage citizen journalism in the DTES to keep track of the stories goin on. Oostindie used the example of an Ottawa project to show how ordinary citizens can be enabled with cameras to tell their stories, which could in turn be aggregated by a VJ. This aggregation could me made into a rich media experience with accompanying Twitter feeds and such.
FCM is planning to train and equip 50 DTES residents with cellural mobile phones to capture photos and video to be uploaded so that the people can tell their story their way.
The idea is to take citizen journalism beyond just being gatekeepers that lead mainstream journalists to the local stories, to actual story-breakers, thereby showing all perspectives rather than just one.
Check out Fearless City Mobile here.
The site for the Vancouver local of The Media Co-op has been archived and will no longer be updated. Please visit the main Media Co-op website to learn more about the organization.