Lively remembering - not to be forgotten

This week has been busy so I'm still catching up on last week's thoughts. After the Prato Dialogue, we did a workshop at the Community Informatics Conference in Italy.

It didn't turn out as we expected. Our plan was to use photos and del.icio.us and the blog - during the workshop - as memories of what we were doing. We were doing "lively remembering" rather than talking about it - that's the CoP perspective bit.

The main desvio in the workshop came from taking photographs. We didn't ask for permission first. I kicked myself because I've always been very sensitive about taking photos. As a child living and traveling in sensitive African countries and with many Muslims, I was conditioned to think that taking photos would cause offence at best and get you beaten or arrested at worst.

Then there was the time when my mum built her website - around ten years ago. She put a photo of her and her four daughters on it. I was shocked that she could contemplate being so public and made her blank out my face!

But I've gone from feeling self-conscious about taking photos to treating it in the same way as I do taking written notes. And the issues and ethics around private and public have changed and become more complex.

Making artifacts private, including photos, often makes less them less accessible to the community they belong to. For example, you take photos of a group event and put them in flickr. If you mark the photos as private, then to access the photos people need a flickr account and be your contact or join a group. But most people I work with can't (don't) manage to work with flickr. Only if I make the photos public, or even embed them in a flickr badge on their site, can the community take ownership of their photos and the community experience.

In conclusion, I don't feel like I've come any closer to resolving an ongoing tension between reifying an experience (or not), where to locate the memory of a community that they can take ownership of it, and how to make it private without it becoming inaccessible or forgotten.

technorati tags:memory, Prato2006

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[sexy girls smoking]

his week has been busy so I'm still catching up on last week's thoughts. After the Prato Dialogue, we did a workshop at the Community Informatics