Community Uses of Co-creative Media Digital storytelling and Co-creative Media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

How is creative expression and communication extended among whole populations? What is the social and cultural value of this activity? What roles do formal agencies, community-based organisations and content producer networks play? Specifically, how do participatory media and arts projects and networks contribute to building this capacity in the contemporary communications environment?

Community Uses of Co-creative Media (CCM) sought to better understand connections between community cultural development and media systems, and to explore their role in supporting Australian communities to engage in the creation of digital media. A core hypothesis of the research was that a range of sectors – community broadcasting, Indigenous broadcasting, community arts, cultural development, and community and activist networked media – share a historical commitment to using “bottom up approaches” to build community-based knowledge of media in ways that can broadly be described as “co-creative”.

A related hypothesis was that these sectors are important experimenters, innovators and facilitators of participatory digital media culture in rapidly changing media and communication environments, and that this capacity is underpinned by the use and adaptation of CCM methods. A systematic approach to understanding this work of these sectors would provide a useful foundation for thinking about potential development pathways.

This research began with the decision to investigate how key people in these sectors could be brought together to exchange accumulated but dispersed knowledge of the drivers, impediments, impacts and potential of digital media for broadening and deepening the possibilities of media participation through creative expression. This was achieved in the first instance by successfully partnering with a range of industry-based organisations to seek Australian Research Council support for this research (see Box 1).

The Industry Partners to this research, and the extensive community arts and media networks they represent, have considerable investments in CCM. They wanted to know more about the appeal of CCM techniques and methods to communities and the ways in which communities made use of them to tell their stories, digitally.

The university researchers wanted to know how this activity helps to build storytelling capacity on a population-wide basis. We wanted to explore a proposition from evolutionary economics, that storytelling can be understood as a social practice as well as an individual capacity. We wanted to explore the ways contemporary storytelling practices help to generate novel contributions to social change through creative expression and use of communications media.

Research questions were forged in the process of establishing this partnership (see Box 2) and a research approach and methods were agreed to be, broadly speaking, participatory. This report provides a summary of the research undertaken, our findings and our conclusions. While it is primarily intended for the information of Industry Partners, it has been written for public dissemination, including through the Industry Partner and CCM practitioner networks that supported and participated in the project.

This report describes the outcomes of research into the formal and informal networks of cultural producers who facilitate the generation of co-creative media (CCM) in Australia. Our overview of this field of practice highlights the critical role of the following five arts, media and education sectors:

CCM practitioners in these sectors are leaders in an incredibly dynamic, emergent field of participatory cultural activity that centres on rapidly developing forms of digitally enabled storytelling. They energise and inspire new ways to connect communities through storytelling. Locating our Industry Partners as major players in relation to CCM allowed us to think systemically

about the forces that align (or misalign) to create conditions that support and restrict innovation in CCM production, as well as the platforms and publics for this activity.

Community, cultural and broadcasting organisations with commitments to promoting storytelling in the public interest are using co-creative approaches in inventive ways to broaden and deepen audience, community and citizen development and engagement. This report gathers qualitative descriptions and findings to provide insights into the ways that these organisations are stimulating and harnessing the creativity of populations. It outlines the drivers, impediments, impacts and potentials that are operating within this field. An overview of the findings is summarised below under these headings. Specific findings are explored in more depth in the body of this report.

Invention in CCM practice is being driven by cultural leaders who are facilitating collaborative experimentation with digital media in a period of rapid technological change. This activity gives rise to an emergent, convergent, cross-disciplinary field, described in this research as the Co-creative Media System. Two key qualities underpin this system and its inventive capacity. These can be described as a capacity to:

Careful Co-creative Media project design has demonstrable social benefits. These arise from privileging practices such as:

The circulation of knowledge and skills, and a concomitant capacity to innovate in CCM practice, is hampered by problems with visibility and shortfalls in skills and resources, including:

The CCM system opens up new ground for articulating and developing inclusive Australian digital media cultures. In addition to enabling broad social objectives it also advances customised solutions to problems of media participation, including the following:

This research was applied and strategic. It took place at a time of major technological disruption to media, communication and cultural industries, and the wider economy. The intention was to improve knowledge and understanding of a convergent and expanding field of cultural activity characterised by inventiveness and creativity and rapid adaptation of methods and technologies for facilitating collaborative storytelling in a wide variety of community contexts. A very specific CCM method provided stable common ground and a starting point for early conversations with Industry Partners and associated practitioner networks. This was the particular method of digital storytelling (DST) developed by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (CDS) in Berkley, California from the mid-1990s (Lambert 2013). It was chosen because knowledge of it had been codified in a way that supported its rapid international diffusion, including to Australia (Hartley and McWilliam 2009; Simondson 2009). A reasonable level of awareness of the method aided the process of identifying a gamut of collaborative storytelling practices – including the CDS method of digital storytelling – that broadly share a common philosophy, the key distinguishing characteristic of CCM (Spurgeon 2013). A broad working definition of “co-creative media” was refined in this dialogue (see Box 3).

Using the idea of CCM, we aimed initially to make this area of activity more visible, including to those organisations and practitioners involved in it. In the early stages of this research, this occurred through a process of self-identification. Practitioners and interested organisations were invited to become a part of the research – first as formal industry partners, then more widely via the Co-creative Communities Forum in Melbourne in late 2012. Using CCM practices like DST as examples of the kinds of activity we were interested in studying, we invited practitioners to map their own practices against this model, i.e. “we do this”, or “we don't do that”.

The people who accepted our invitation to participate in a dialogue about these practices, and who helped develop our understanding of the current conditions and environment shaping the emergent Co-Creative Media System, came from four areas:

The research activities reported here took place over a four year period from 2010 to 2014. The chief investigators, research associates and Industry Partners, listed in full in Appendix 1, undertook conferencing and networking activities, conducted workshops and experimental projects, interviewed over forty-five industrious CCM practitioners, wrote up a series of detailed case studies and published a significant body of academic research (see Appendix 2 for a list of outputs).

We found that recent Australian CCM practice is a whirlwind of activity that receives limited recognition outside of its immediate local environments. It is occurring in the absence of strong cross sector networks and without a funding infrastructure that officially recognises this activity. In amongst this commotion are eddies of uniquely inventive and vibrant practice that push boundaries through their experimental nature and through their cross-sector hybridity. Even where CCM practice may once have been explicitly modelled on the digital storytelling methods of pioneering organisations like the Centre for Digital Storytelling (CDS) or ACMI, this is no longer the case. DST is now one practice among many other critical approaches to collaborative media production (Helen Simondson, 2011: research interview).

Implicitly and explicitly, many organisations questioned the co-creative label. According to one respondent, ‘I’ve never heard that term before, but I usually call my work “collaborative research”, so it’s probably the same thing, give or take. I think there are a lot of different words that emerge for this kind of participatory media practice, which is about working with communities and people to tell their own stories’ (Alex Kelly, Research Interview 2012). At the Co-Creative Communities forum, a number of participants described their interest in the craft of storytelling and its evolution more than an interest in digital storytelling in either its generic or specific conceptions, (McWilliam 2008, p.46).

In his forum presentation, Scott Rankin (Big hART) said, ‘the co-creative community approach to story goes back to the dawn of time and is in actual fact the very basis of our lives and our societies and our nation states. And so, storytelling, story making, the simple art of it is incredibly powerful and potent and political, and Big hART is super interested in that.’

These responses are in-keeping with ‘a growing backlash’ from within the community arts and cultural development (CACD) sector to the assumption that digital media is inherently more innovative or participatory. ‘There is no doubt that the role and potential of digital media as creative tools in producing art can, and has, been regularly overstated. In our opinion some of the most innovative practice currently in the CACD sector is happening in overtly non-digital realms of arts and craft ...’ (Feral Arts, 2012). The resistance to the CCM label by community broadcasters could also be understood in terms of the wider sectoral view that it ‘was formed and is based on a participatory model’, and that participatory and co-creative concepts are already ‘embedded in the nature of the sector’ (Kath Letch, 2012: Research Interview).

We adopted the expression “CCM”; however, as a general descriptor of the critical, collaborative practices of interest in this research it allowed us to think systemically about a complex activity, and to draw attention to the links between practices occurring in different places, that had perhaps not been made before. This process began with attempting to name and describe a practice, to pin down what defines it, and work out its value, and to then look to the systems that support this diverse and evolving way of engaging with communities. We discovered that when we talked with people from a range of sectors about what kind of work CCM may encompass, we were having a conversation about a huge area of activity. Although this activity looks random and disorganised, there are some patterns.

We found there are some critical elements that practitioners from a range of sectors identify as fundamental. CCM activity, like DST, is a purposive, bottom up form of creative engagement. It is a practice informed by a philosophical alliance with critical, participatory pedagogy, and this approach to engaging with often marginalised and disadvantaged storytellers is an important driver for activity (Spurgeon, 2013 p. 7). For many practitioners there is a distinctive dual agenda in operation: balancing a concern in supporting the capacity of individuals and communities to ‘represent themselves’ (Thumin, 2009) with an interest in progressing the potential for digital media to support communities to ‘tell a wider range of stories than the few that dominate national politics, the movies, journalism and education’ (Hartley 2013, p.102). Here the hope is that such, ‘“user-created citizenship” will revise, not reproduce, our understanding of “who we are as a people”’ (Hartley 2013, p.102, emphasis added).

CCM activity in Australia arises across the intersecting networks of the five types of organisations that were partners in this research:

Practitioners in each of these sectors have a connection to storytelling and to new media and are leaders in an emergent field of cultural activity around digitally enabled storytelling. It is the energy, inspiration and capacity to connect with communities, of those operating in this space, that is driving invention in CCM practice.

Figure 1 describes the emergent system that produces CCM in Australia. It is evolving and dynamic, but locating our Industry Partners as major players in relation to CCM allowed us to think systemically about the institutions that align (or misalign) to create conditions that support and restrict CCM activity. While our Industry Partners are interested in the development of CCM and support CCM projects, practitioners and practitioner networks to varying extents, no single sector wholly “owns”, occupies or directly corresponds to CCM activity. Rather, CCM is more accurately conceived as a field of experimental creative practice that arises in and between a variety of arts, media and non-government institutions, including the five main sectors represented by Industry Partners in this project, and depicted in Figure 1.

The CCM field itself is occupied by dozens, if not hundreds, of independent producers/practitioners who are crucial community catalysts and conduits in the CCM field. It appears that, almost without exception, these practitioner/producers initially developed their CCM expertise in one or more of the bounding institutions represented by Industry Partners through a blend of formal, informal and experiential learning opportunities. They continue to hone this expertise, usually working as sole practitioners or in small to medium and social enterprises. This includes expertise in forging relationships between communities and institutions across the field and beyond, to tailor projects and programs that build creative capacity for digital storytelling (broadly defined) from the ground, up. Much of this activity occurs in regional Australia, where community needs for building such capacity can be acute. Importantly, CCM producers and practitioners also seek to establish and maintain enduring relationships with communities, as far as resources permit. They make a profound, though as yet largely unquantified contribution, to the population-wide development of capacity for creative expression and social participation. There is a lot of movement in this system, despite the absence of higher level, system-wide mechanisms for enabling collaboration or coordination. For example, producers and creative practitioners move between projects supported by different institutions, and work simultaneously on projects that could, or do, draw direct or indirect support from the institutions and types of organisations and associated networks that are identified in Figure 1. CCM practitioners and enabling institutions also participate in the wider, developing creative economy (Cunningham, 2008). For example, CCM practitioners actively promote, transfer and adapt CCM methods for use in other service sectors, including education, health, welfare and allied social services (Lambert 2013; Lundby, 2008). There is also a considerable amount of NGO involvement and interest in the CCM field. The CCM system is also internationalised, to the extent that each contributing sector and many of the linking practitioners are active participants in international networks that share common interests in advancing knowledge of CCM best practice. These influences are noted in the attached case study and demonstrator project summaries, and in other parts of this report, but are not generally covered in the main findings, which are limited to the influence of the key institutions of CCM, represented by Industry Partners.

Figure 1

While the terrain of the CCM field is uneven, there are, nonetheless, patterns that can be discerned in and across it that make it possible to think systematically about it. The reliance on storytelling and critical participatory media methods are two such patterns that have already been discussed. Other patterns are impressed on the field by the institutions and networks that bound the field, such as those of the Industry Partners in this project. Each of these sectors has a specific history, arrays of associated networks and a unique place in public life, and is motivated to support for Co-Creative Media activity, directly and indirectly, for a variety of reasons. They contribute to experimental and inventive CCM practices informed by expert knowledge and experiences developed in their specialist domains.

While a summary of the patterns of strengths and weakness risks over-simplify the creative multi-skilling that occurs, it is worth making some generalisations for the purpose of viewing the CCM system as a whole. For example, community arts and cultural development (CACD) practitioners are generally very capable creatives. They are nimble and adaptive, master negotiators, and skilled at project management; they are networkers, and they work in a way that typically directs attention to processes of content creation rather than product. Professionals working in or with backgrounds in Public Cultural Institutions such as cultural heritage institutions and public service broadcasters value professionalism, product excellence and quality community engagement. CCM producers in and from community media networks share many of the characteristics of CACD practitioners, although their actual practices are more strongly shaped by “pro-am” aspirations and interest in the development and use of media platforms for the purpose of enabling democratic forms of community-based media participation. Indigenous media CCM practitioners are enterprising, culturally inventive and solutions-focused. Many CCM practitioners have relevant tertiary education qualifications, and university researchers value the opportunities presented by CCM to deepen and develop knowledge in a range of domains, including, in this instance, the role of creative expression and end user influence in digital cultures and economies.

Table 1 highlights the strengths of each of the Industry Partner institutions that contribute to the Australian CCM system. They are identified in the top horizontal axis of Table 1, along with a project-based example of CCM practice. The vertical axis indicates five dimensions of practice that CCM producers and practitioners based in these institutional contexts and networks are addressing in various inventive ways. Table 1 shows that CCM activity expresses the cultural orientation of supporting institutions; for example, in the way they prioritise particular participatory practices, how they value certain producer qualities and how particular kinds of user experience are prioritised. Each institution also takes up certain positions in terms of its temporal focus on community engagement, and this is also reflected in the priorities of CCM activity. Keywords are used to succinctly describe these institutional orientations to CCM. Their meanings are illustrated in a brief discussion of project-based examples below. This matrix, then, is an attempt to begin a conversation about how we identify the major contributions that actors and the different networks they work through make in developing Co-Creative Media practices. It attempts to do this by proposing a systematic understanding of the wider institutional context in which Co-Creative Media emerges. The aim of Table 1 is not to suggest, for example, that quality of experience for participants is not important to public culture institutions, or that quality outcomes are not important to CACD practitioners – far from it. The reality of practice is that all sectors are meeting the indicative challenges of Co-Creative Media in ways that emphasise certain CCM values and demonstrate particular strengths. The table points to the potential benefits that could arise from recognising patterns in these strengths and enhancing the level of connection between networks with this kind of appreciation in mind.

Case studies and demonstrator projects undertaken as part of this research (introduced shortly and summarised in Appendices D and E to this report) illustrate the specific strengths of each contributing sector to the emergent Co-Creative Media System. For example, in the time of this research the Creative Recovery Network (CRN) was formed by Community Arts and Cultural Development organisations and practitioners. It was part of a larger arts-led response to the challenges faced by disaster-affected communities. The CRN supported expert arts facilitation for the purpose of building community resilience for dealing with natural disasters. This network supported multi-party, arts recovery collaborations with disaster-affected communities. Participants used storytelling and other methods of creative expression to help individuals recover from the trauma of natural disaster, and communities to recover lost and damaged heritage (social construction). The Creative Recovery Network also captured experiential knowledge of arts recovery methods and practices and made this available online via the Feral Arts PlaceStories platform. This resource supports rapid adoption and adaptation of creative recovery methods within the CACD network and by other organisations involved in ongoing recovery work in and with disaster-affected communities, including, for example, Lifeline, schools and local government agencies.

Also in the time of this study, community broadcaster Maddy McFarlane set out to explore new music sub-cultures of Melbourne, many of which are associated with new waves of migrant and refugee settlement in Australia. Instead of simply documenting these sub-cultures, Maddy worked with a group of musicians and a community-based organisation to explore ways in which they could use the infrastructure operated and managed by community radio station PBS (including transmission infrastructure, production and broadcasting facilities and program schedules) to represent themselves (self-representation) on a continuing (sustainable) basis. The learning process that took place between the musicians and the community broadcasting facilitator was dialogic and informal (social learning). It took the form of an ongoing conversation across cultural differences. Maddy was supported throughout by a national documentary training program for the community broadcasting sector (support for volunteerism and pro/am movement). The ensuing radio documentary program was recognised as a model of participatory documentary best practice in the 2014 awards of the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia.

With its specific focus on screen culture, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is an internationally recognised leader in the development of participatory approaches to public culture. Generator is an important example of ACMI’s participatory approach to stewardship of screen culture. Generator is a virtual creative studio that supports users to create, share, tag and distribute their own short films using original content as well as content sourced from a substantial archive of copyright-free audiovisual materials (engagement, preservation). Generator was developed in collaboration with the education sector and screen production industries and was launched in 2010 as a closed user environment for secondary school use. Generator content, including that created by users, is thematically curated and searchable. In the period of this project there was a shift from pre-moderation to post-moderation of user-generated content contributed to Generator. This development indicated the high level of trust that education partners in particular have come to have in Generator (professionalism, quality product).

Kimberly Girl is a novel re-invention of the beauty pageant that uses a competitive participatory media approach to create an intensive peer-learning and leadership development experience for young Indigenous women. It is produced and presented by Indigenous media, communications, events and training social enterprise, Goolarri Media Enterprises. It has enjoyed huge popular success in remote Western Australian communities for over a decade. Skilled GME staff, personally invested in the communities they serve, worked with family networks, communications platforms and event management systems to create Kimberly Girl, which offers a highly successful social solution to improving employment prospects for young Indigenous women – arguably one that has a greater impact than many other programs intended to ‘close the gap’ on Indigenous disadvantage (Rennie and Potts 2011; 2012). It is a format that has been successfully adopted for use in other locations (for example, Pilbara Girl) and reflects the Indigenous media sector’s insistence on the centrality of opportunities for creative expression to Indigenous wellbeing and social and economic prosperity.

A group of women from refugee backgrounds, supported by a refugee settlement agency, wanted to share their stories of arrival and settlement with Australian-born audiences. University research student Nina Woodrow took this opportunity to facilitate a collaborative experiment that involved CACD media artists and the State Library of Queensland as a fieldwork component of a larger enquiry into the creative and ethical challenges of using Co-creative Media methods. Participants generated audiovisual narratives in a series of workshops which were finalised in the form of a 16 minute video, Our True Colours. This was screened as part of an International Women’s Day event in 2014 that was curated to encourage public dialogue with the women and their stories. An action research approach was used to shape the experiment and to generate insights into how Co-creative Media methods equip vulnerable social groups with the tools required for creative expression, in order for them to tell their stories in their own ways. The experiment advanced knowledge of the complexity of Co-creative Media practices, including the importance of storytellers in driving adaptation of Co-Creative Media methods and uptake (propagation). The experiment also showed how Co-Creative Media activity helps to inform and progress important public conversations about social issues such as refugee settlement and the meaning of Australian citizenship.

The examples discussed so far illustrate how CCM practices map onto, and link with, various networks in one or more of the sectors that make up the larger, emergent CCM system. In this research we also looked at many instances of cross-sector collaboration in order to explore the constraints and benefits of collaboration to CCM practice, and to the larger system. Many examples are considered in publications arising from this research project. These publications are listed in Appendix B: Research Outputs. In addition to the five examples briefly discussed in the preceding paragraphs, a further six are described in attachments to this report and, for reasons of their relevance to the main findings, are outlined below. CCM provides a common thread of analysis for two international examples, The Mixing Room in the national Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa; and the US-based Association for Independent Radio’s Localore project. Additional Australian examples summarised here are CitizenJ, All The Best, The New England and North West Sound Trail, Digistories, and Solidarity Is Not A Crime.

The contrast between The Mixing Room and Localore highlights the scope of applications for CCM methods. The two projects also illustrate the scale of benefits to creative innovation and community connection where CCM activity is well-resourced. The Mixing Room used CCM methods to capture the intangible heritage of young refugees who are now making New Zealand their home. In addition to creating a successful, ongoing, interactive exhibition The Mixing Room also provided the opportunity for Te Papa to update and expand its curatorial and design repertoire in the process of working with CCM methods and practitioners. The Localore project embedded ten teams of expert media arts producers in public radio stations across the US for a year to lead community-based transmedia storytelling experiments. Every production was different, but all were acclaimed for their beauty, inventiveness and excellence in design for participation that modelled shifts in public media’s relationship to audiences. Australian examples also suggest that the range of CCM applications is expansive and inventive, even when constrained by limited and uncertain resources.

CitizenJ was a multi-party collaboration hosted by the State Library of Queensland’s creativity incubator, The Edge, with support from community radio stations 4ZZZ and 4EB, the Community Media Training Organisation, AFTRS Open, and a Fairfax family foundation. The project developed a community of practice that supported community engagement and creative exploration of platforms and ethical practices for citizen journalism. Interestingly, the CitizenJ editorial group remained active for a considerable period of time after resources for professional facilitation were exhausted, sustaining themselves through the use of social media.

All The Best is a loose adaptation of the very successful National Public Radio program, This American Life. The multiplatform format was developed by Sydney-based radio producers at community station FBi, in part to overcome the limited reach of the FBi broadcast signal. Riding on the resurgence of interest in the art of storytelling and performance, All The Best was very successful in reaching new audiences, and now draws upon a national production base that includes community radio stations in almost every state. The CCM practices of All The Best are informed by traditions in social documentary and ideals of excellence in audio arts. These interests were reflected in important live experiments with the capabilities of digital radio that took place as part of the GRAPHIC Festival in 2012 and 2013. Radio producers collaborated with writers, musicians and graphic and fine artists as well as university-based teaching practitioners to create an immensely popular live broadcast, Radio With Pictures.

The Story Project is an independent production company that uses CCM methods to create sound trails in regional areas of Australia. Interestingly, sound trails have so far been developed without any direct support from community arts or media funding agencies. Most support has come from local governments, angel investors and the independent education sector. The first sound trail was created by and for communities in New England and North Western NSW. The Story Project worked with community-based storytellers, musicians, poets, students and local community arts supporters to tell stories about locations in the region. These can be accessed using a mobile phone app, but rely on GPS technology rather than mobile network connectivity to deliver rich, self-guided audio tours across the region. One of the most significant sites included in the New England and North Western Sound Trail is Myall Creek, where the sound trail impresses an important layer of cultural interpretation on an Aboriginal massacre site. It provides an elegant, affordable alternative to a “bricks and mortar” solution, which continues to elude local communities.

Co-Creative Media projects have generated considerable bodies of creative work that find audiences in one-off contexts such as festivals. Digistories experimented with the use of Creative Commons licensing to improve understanding of the opportunities and challenges for the downstream re-purposing of CCM content for television. The principle concern was with how a non-exclusive rights management strategy could be used to manage the risks to storytellers in a broadcast television context. Community TV licensee, 31 Digital, and QUT researchers, developed a three part TV pilot for this purpose. The experience suggested that storyteller interest would not generally constrain the use of this material to engage with a community of practice in Digital Storytelling and other CCM methods. However, managing and curating such activity would require a professional approach and a commensurate level of resourcing.

Professional development for CCM practitioners usually takes place in the field. This challenge is illustrated in the final example included in this report. Solidarity Is Not A Crime documents how internationally recognised community media artist Zoe Scrogings went about building e-book publication capacity to her repertoire of skills. It shows that technical support for CCM practitioners is often stretched, where it exists at all.

In summary, the examples included in this report are not included for the purpose of providing a definitive or exhaustive situational analysis of the individuals, projects, organisations or networks that contributed generously to this research. Rather, they are indicative of the qualitative strengths and opportunities that key arts and media institutions and networks bring to the CCM system, as well as weaknesses and threats that arise for practitioners and producers in the CCM field.

This project aimed to improve knowledge of the ways in which participatory culture is facilitated by community arts and media networks. It approached this problem as one of understanding how innovation occurs in a complex open social system, and used Participatory Action Research methods to collaboratively investigate the problem with Industry Partners and their associated networks. Digital storytelling practices provided a starting point for empirical data collection, and CCM was proposed as a way to unify thinking about the kind of social participation these networks facilitate. The main forms of data collection were:

There were two main rounds of interviews and then a final round of interviews with case study and demonstrator project principles.

The first round of semi-structured industry interviews and discussions was conducted between April and August 2011 with representatives from the five Industry Partners (CBAA, Australia Council, ACMI, 31Digital and Goolarri Media). On the basis of the networks mentioned during these interviews (Industry Partner networks), as well as the pre-existing knowledge and additional research of the university-based research team, further interview subjects were identified. Interviewees spanned community arts, cultural development, community broadcasting, screen resource, cultural heritage and media activist sectors.

On the basis of this fieldwork, we were able to:

Additional interviews were conducted with personnel involved in the case studies and demonstrator projects (discussed below). These interviews were used to inform the process of examining and documenting cases that illustrate unique and successful examples of CCM practice.

A Participatory Action Research approach (Hearn et. al, 2009) was applied to the logistical challenges of discovering and ascertaining the role of community arts and media network participants relevant to this research. To this end, a two-day event was devised.

Co-Creative Communities: Storytelling Futures for Community Arts and Media was a public forum exploring the critical issues and innovations shaping community-focused uses of media. It was held over two days in November 2012 at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, in Melbourne. This event was planned and programmed in close consultation with Industry Partners and extensively promoted through their networks. The sold-out forum was attended by 160 participants, coming from every state of Australia and from a wide range of sectors, including community broadcasting, public broadcasting, Indigenous media, social justice organisations, community arts and cultural development organisations, screen arts and cultural heritage institutions, industry peak bodies and funding agencies. Many creative practitioners present also attended the forum – storytellers, documentary makers, radio producers, media artists, and so on. All of the researchers and Industry Partners participated in the forum, which included presentations by Jean Burgess (QUT), John Hartley (Curtin), Michael Torres (Goolarri Media Enterprises), Kath Letch (CBAA) and Helen Simondson (ACMI).

One of the main aims of the forum was to be pragmatic and solutions-focused, by showcasing new CCM examples currently in production. Another aim was to foster an exchange of ideas across sectors. To this end, the symposium invited national and international speakers from across community broadcasting, public broadcasting, community arts, cultural development, cultural heritage and social justice to talk about their approaches to producing, distributing and building audiences for community-driven CCM (Edmond, 2013).

Videos and full transcripts of the forum are archived online and have provided extremely useful information for this project, including the foundation for case studies.

The forum received media coverage in Crikey and on various other blogs and websites. The event was cited as a resource for community arts practitioners by ArtsVictoria, Castanet and VicHealth (see Making Art with Communities guide). Some of the key themes and ideas that emerged from the forum have since been discussed in scholarly publications, including several articles published by the Chief Investigators in the 6.1 (2013) issue of Cultural Science Journal, and in Weight (2013) The forum was immediately followed by the CCM Exchange on Day 2. Where the Day 1 forum provided an opportunity for participants to discuss ideas of CCM best practice with nationally and internationally recognised authorities. The CCM Exchange spotlighted “coal face” challenges of practitioners at the development phase of CCM projects. This was a closed event. Participation was either by application or by invitation. A national call for project proposals to be workshopped at the

CCM Exchange was disseminated through Industry Partner networks in conjunction with promotion for the forum.

Seventeen proposals were received and six proposals were short-listed in consultation with Industry Partners to be presented and thematically workshopped in small groups by a total of forty mentors drawn from forum presenters and participants. Three demonstrator projects for this research project were identified through this process and the development of these projects was tracked as a research activity. Other demonstrator projects were identified by Industry Partners or research students associated with the project. A number of case studies were also identified through this process and the development of these projects was also monitored as a research activity.

A key finding to emerge from our research is that there is a very rich and rapidly evolving field of CCM activity that is bounded by community arts and cultural development, cultural heritage, and community and public service broadcasting and educational sectors. This is described here as the informal Australian CCM system. The range of practices that arise in this system is extremely diverse and no single project emerges from our study as being emblematic of it. For this reason, we developed a series of case studies and demonstrator projects in order to describe and investigate its complexity.

Case studies were selected as exemplars of innovative or best practice in CCM production. They arose from direct contact with already existing projects. Demonstrator projects were mostly identified from applications to participate in the CCM Exchange and were in early phases of development. Following the CCM Exchange, researchers approached project presenters and negotiated arrangements to join them as participant observers in documenting their progress, providing research and giving modest material support where appropriate and possible. Reports on seven of these case studies and five demonstrator projects are included in Appendices D and E. Other projects mentioned throughout the summary of findings have been the subject of publications elsewhere, as referenced. The case studies reported in Appendix D and summarised in the previous section are:

These case studies and demonstrator projects are also used as examples to illustrate various activities of the CCM system and practice throughout this report.

The research activities for this project made good initial use of the professional and informal networks of chief investigators, research associates and partner investigators. These networks were important enablers of the research process. In line with the aims of the research overall, developing and strengthening cross-sectorial relationships and “networking networks” became an important output of the project. The Co-Creative Communities forum at ACMI in Melbourne in November 2012 was an important early milestone for the research. This event broke new ground, in that cultural practitioners came together across sector and national boundaries, identifying common ground in a critical approach to participatory media practice.

A list of conference and networking activity is included in Appendix F. An outcome of this activity was an increased awareness of the role that networks play in sustaining agility and innovation in the sector. Our experience engaging in conferencing and networking activity has underscored the value of a sustainable cross-sector network of CCM practitioners, producers and agencies. When networking of this kind is supported, valuable opportunities for synergies and cross-fertilisation are seeded, with exponential benefits for genuine new links and innovation in practices.

Scoping and mapping CCM practice was an important aim of the project. Although it is clear that CCM practice is an eclectic, widespread and evolving cornerstone of creative and collaborative work in the community arts, media and cultural development sectors, there are some challenges involved in accurately reporting the extent and locations of the practice. The research team

conducted a data collection and visualisation exercise that aimed to explore and offer a preliminary qualitative description of the Australian community CCM sector.

As this report makes clear, one of the major challenges facing any analysis of the CCM system is its relative invisibility. Existing at the nexus of multiple sectors, CCM is an elusive object of analysis; it is difficult to define, measure, evaluate or locate, and no industry agencies exist to collect this data in a systematic way. This data collection and visualisation exercise was an experimental effort aiming to collate some routine information about a sector that does not formally exist, with the purpose being exploratory rather than scientific.

Figure 2 provides a network visualisation. This is an image which, while not attempting to map the territory, offers an aid to further exploration. The exercise was not a formal social network analysis of the CCM sector. Although we do visualise connections in the form of inter-organisational recognition (that is, where a research participant from one organisation mentioned the work of another organisation), exhaustively capturing all connections among all known CCM organisations in the country was not originally an objective of the project; it is an incidental data set.

Figure 2

However, despite the very partial and unstable nature of the data used to generate this visualisation, showing change over time in the scope and depth of the research project’s knowledge is still useful. It also brought together for the first time some basic information about the locations, genres and inter-organisational connections among producers of community-led CCM, including, but not limited to, digital storytelling, and offers some provocations to future research in the area.

In reporting the overall findings of the research we were able to draw on a few observations that emerged from this exercise. One of these observations is that most initiatives take place in one State/Territory, and most organisations don’t reach beyond the State/Territory in which their offices are based. Exceptions to this include Big hART(which routinely works with a range of non-urban communities around Australia), FeralArts’ PlaceStories initiative (an online platform for sharing content, including co-creative media), and nationwide initiatives coordinated by the ABC (such as ABC Pool and its successor ABC Open). Most initiatives take place in either urban or non-urban areas, but not both. An exception is The Stories Project by CuriousWorks which was involved in storytelling projects in Western Sydney (metropolitan NSW) and the Western Desert (remote WA).

Another outcome was the discovery of exactly how fast practitioners are innovating in this field. Interviewees reported projects which they identified as “co-creative”, based on their own understanding of the term. As a result, the data incorporates a wide range of participatory, community-oriented media and arts initiatives, some of which adhere closely to established definitions of CCM practice (Spurgeon et al 2009), but many which do not. The dataset includes entries that could be more accurately understood as social media strategies, transmedia documentaries, interactive new media art, user-generated content, remote Indigenous broadcasters, community radio or community theatre. It includes software, platforms and other tools for the post-production and distribution of community-based media content. And it includes a large number of initiatives and organisations that incorporate digital media as one aspect of a wider participatory arts practice (that might also incorporate theatre, bushcrafts, painting, creative writing, etc.).

The open-ended variety of CCM activities presents considerable difficulties for developing a typology based on media technologies. Place-based, geo-locative projects, for example, are usually also web projects that make use of Google Maps or other online mapping tools. Projects that are principally audio might also incorporate some visual material. This complexity reflects a movement away from traditional, workshop-based digital storytelling towards much greater experimentation with co-creative methods (see, for example, ACMI’s development of the Generator and 15 Second Place platforms). It also reflects the widespread incorporation of digital media into the community arts and cultural development sector, where it typically exists alongside a range of other media and art forms.

The remote Indigenous field was mapped separately. Due to its distinct funding sources and dedicated distribution platforms, we were able to conduct a comprehensive survey of CCM by, or about, Indigenous Australians living in remote areas. The research team undertook in-depth desktop research into well over 100 CCM projects that took place between 2010 and 2013 (see Rennie, 2013). Once the size and nature of the co-creative sector was known, we then collated information on all screen production (not just co-creative) between 2003 and 2013 and compared the level of public investment in the co-creative field with that of the professional field.

Some of the mapping data gathered through this project is available as an online directory of Australian organisations involved in CCM activity. In the final stages of this project, mapping data was also used as the basis for developing the Digital Storytelling and CCM network using Feral Arts’ PlaceStories platform.

Careful storytelling project design using a participative, CCM process has demonstrable social benefits

The circulation of knowledge and skills, and a concomitant capacity to innovate in CCM practice, is hampered by the invisibility of the work, the uneven distribution of digital skills, and sector-specific funding that fails to reflect the multi-platform and trans-disciplinary reality of the Australian community media landscape.

The CCM making system is breaking new ground in extending the public conversation about copyright and intellectual property, in embracing a participatory digital culture and in experimenting with transmedia, in spite of the impediments articulated in this report.

We began this research into CCM across a range of sectors with a number of questions. We wanted to understand more about the limits of scale and operational constraints that impact on the practice, about how the value of CCM could be optimised for communities of interest, about how knowledge of co-creative methods and outputs could be shared in the networks in which our Industry Partners are located, and about the implications of all this for the infrastructure that supports (or at times fails to support) this important form of collaborative creativity.

We found that co-creative approaches are already being used in genuinely cutting edge and inventive ways to facilitate value creation for Australian communities. Assembling the case studies and demonstrator project reports as part of this research was a study in the power of storytelling, social learning systems and human creativity. Within our research we saw many instances of producers and artists seizing opportunities to work with communities to produce uniquely creative outcomes, generating cultural solutions and innovations as part of the process. Skills for online social participation and digital content creation are developed within these projects through a diverse array of informal, customised and context-aware learning opportunities. Significantly, these kinds of initiatives are lowering the barriers for participation, addressing access, diversity and inclusion and testing methods for building a distinctly Australian digital media culture that supports population-wide creativity. CCM lubricates the social exchange process by generating rich, knowledge-intense forms of cultural expression.

Having established that CCM activity has social impacts that matter, and that broad-based innovation through creative participation is being harnessed through this practice in important ways, the question becomes: how do we support it? We noted that producers and artists active in this field are unusually adventurous and resourceful; they are often independently driving their own projects and taking responsibility for sourcing what they need to experiment and innovate with CCM practice. We also found cultural institutions and established networks for community driven media are sharing accumulated knowledge, refining and distinguishing core values, and experimenting with traditional methods. These organisations and networks serve as invaluable springboards for new initiatives.

Taking a wider view, we also learnt about the conditions that frame CCM activity. The projects within the scope of our study emerged from what we have described as a CCM system that is framed by cultural and educational institutions, by Indigenous media and by communities of practice centred on CACD and community media around the country. Each of these sectors and networks have distinctive cultural and methodological contributions to offer. This CCM system is made up of landmarks in an imagined terrain, which form the boundaries of a field of activity.

An emerging self-consciousness across the breadth and depth of this system about what community driven media does best and what it does differently influences the capacity of the system to optimise creative ability and to drive invention. In other words, as independent CCM producers and artists, participating communities, institutional auspicers and organisers (such as networks and industry bodies, as well as cultural institutions) and funders begin to recognise CCM making as an internally coherent, cross-disciplinary field of practice, then a range of new possibilities are opened up. This fledgling awareness is the spark that connects practitioners to connect across sectors; it

drives the invention of creative, adaptable solutions and initiatives.

While this research has indicated a series of questions that flow from this recognition, it would be premature to prescribe sweeping, formal, top-down policy interventions. Nonetheless, there are a range of policy, funding and infrastructure implications, and some approaches that, if adopted by practitioners, organisations and networks, could increase or improve opportunities for cross-fertilisation, collaboration, coordination and knowledge sharing across the informal Australian CCM system.