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.
Box 1
Industry and University Partners
Queensland Community Television (
Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
Swinburne University of Technology (Swinburne)
Curtin University (Curtin)
(See Appendix A for full details.)
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.
Box 2
Research Questions
How do cultural and broadcasting organisations with “public good” commitments to access, participation, diversity and inclusion use co-creative approaches to facilitate value-creation in a context of falling barriers to communicative interaction and social participation?
What operational constraints arise; how can these be addressed?
How can open, future-oriented understandings of the value of CCM improve and innovate the existing infrastructure, practices and processes supported by these agencies?
How can the value of CCM be optimised for the communities of interest involved in these activities; and how can knowledge about co-creative methods and outputs be made available in Industry Partner networks?
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:
Indigenous Media
Community Media
Public Cultural Institutions
Community Arts and Cultural Development
Universities
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
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:
Go outside disciplinary silos and
Articulate a social purpose.
Careful Co-creative Media project design has demonstrable social benefits. These arise from privileging practices such as:
Designing for public participation
Embedding methods such as participatory action research and socially-engaged arts in new ways
Leveraging digital media and communication technologies and platforms
Extending a capacity for curatorial creativity to users
Mobilising enterprising cultural solutions to address intractable social problems
Supporting creative expressions of identity
Building resilience through storytelling
Using offline work as a critical precursor to online engagement
Seeking to create connected, skilled and adaptable communities.
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:
Limited mechanisms for sharing knowledge of diverse practices across the cultural and media sectors that make up the Co-creative Media System
Impediments to mapping this field of cultural activity and improving the visibility of CCM
Limited resources and funding gaps
Limited opportunities and support for professional development of digital media skills and peer-to-peer exchange of ideas and resources.
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:
Testing new models for negotiating intellectual property, respecting the intentions of storytellers and fulfilling a “responsibility to the story” in CCM practice
Demonstrating a practice where the quality of the interaction is valued
Modelling an entrepreneurial capacity to seek creative excellence in difficult circumstances
Experimenting and innovating in the move to “full spectrum” public media
Providing fertile ground for the development of creative, independent producers.
We began our research into Co-Creative Media (CCM) with a chain of propositions about storytelling. This chain begins with the idea that storytelling is a timeless human tool for both the reinforcement of existing ideas and values and the emergence of new ones. Storytelling is the cultural container of communities and of communal viability. As Hartley and Potts (2014, p.70) explain, ‘culture is the “survival vehicle” for groups (and) stories are the survival vehicle for culture’. Thus, storytelling is not just an individual capacity but an enduring and renewable form of human creativity that serves social and cultural purposes. This is apparent in the way that it is universally practiced in vernacular, private and everyday contexts (Burgess, 2006), as well as in public ones, generating communities (and “publics”) as the stories circulate and are elaborated. Once storytelling capacity develops in these spheres of life, then the technologies, forms and platforms for storytelling, and the new ideas and values packaged within these stories, become potentially economically useful (Hartley, 2013).
Our starting point for this research, then, is the observation that storytelling is a vital part of cultural and economic life. Where energy and resources are devoted to extending storytelling capacity across whole populations, where broad access and inclusion are valued, where there is a self-conscious concern with story formats, publication and dissemination, and where story curation is alert to the meta-narratives being supported, then societies will have access to better tools to explore the health of communal life and to become more robust and adaptable. It is therefore worth trying to understand and support the development of the systems and networks that support collaborative, co-creative storytelling practices that place human purpose at the centre of the work.
A rising chorus of new media scholars are commenting on contemporary storytelling practices, patterns of engagement and communication that democratise media production (Couldry, 2008) and disrupt old-fashioned notions of who is a teller and who is a listener. Over the past decade, new media have lowered the barriers to interaction and digital content creation (Jenkins, 2006); but dip below the surface of this tide of social media activity and we find that there are persistent inequities in the access that people have to the skills, resources and opportunities allowing them to create and distribute creative/personally expressive online content (Warschauer, 2004; Hargittai & Walejko, 2008; Schradie, 2011). As Hargittai and Walejko (2008) explain, ‘creative activity is related to similar factors as it was in previous times: a person’s socioeconomic status … (and) while it may be that digital media are levelling the playing field when it comes to exposure to content, engaging in creative pursuits remains unequally distributed by social background’ (p.252). The research focus on CCM counterbalances some of the simplistic notions presently circulating about the ubiquity of user-generated content and skills for self-representation and social participation in the internet era (Spurgeon and Burgess 2015). For example, significant disparities in fixed and mobile internet access and costs persist between regional, remote and metropolitan communication environments. Socioeconomic factors also influence uptake and usage, and are likely to for the foreseeable future. CCM can be understood as an emergent system of collaborative social and cultural experimentation that seeks practical solutions to these constraints on self-representation and social participation. For these reasons, it is also characteristically “pre-commercial” with an orientation to social enterprise.
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).
Box 3
Defining Co-Creative Media
A shared philosophical orientation is the defining characteristic of Co-creative Media (CCM), and is informed by:
Critiques of mass media representation;
Critical approaches to teaching and learning in social context (pedagogy);
Curiosity about the possibilities for creative excellence in media self-representation, and
Perceptions of the importance of personal storytelling to social change, knowledge, and humanistic endeavour.
Christina Spurgeon, ‘The Art of Co-creative Media: An Australian Survey.
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
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:
Indigenous Media – social enterprises involved in media, arts and entertainment services development and delivery, using a variety of media forms and platforms
Community Media – radio and television stations, online and digital media projects, enterprises and networks
Public Cultural Institutions – cultural heritage institutions and public service broadcasters
Community Arts and Cultural Development – practitioners, agencies and networks.
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
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
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
CCM activity in Australia arises across the intersecting networks of the five types of organisations that were partners in this research:
Indigenous Media
Community Media
Public Cultural Institutions
Community Arts and Cultural Development
Universities.
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.
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.
Co-creative Media – Indicative Strengths of Institutions and Networks
Indicator | Institutions and Networks | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Community Arts and Cultural Development (eg Creative Recovery Network) | Community Broadcasting (eg PBS documentary) | Public culture (eg ACMI Generator) | Indigenous Media (eg Kimberly Girl) | Universities (eg Our True Colours) | |
social construction | self- representation | stewardship | social solutions | enquiry | |
quality of experience | infrastructure operation and management | quality of outcomes | social enterprise development | propagation | |
expert arts facilitation | volunteerism, pro-am movement | professionalism | leadership | insight | |
creative expression | social learning | engagement | invention | knowledge | |
resilience | sustainability | preservation | insistence | progress |
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
Also in the time of this study,
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
Kimberly Girl is a novel re-
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.
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:
interviewing key industry professionals
conducting a forum and practitioner exchange
compiling case studies of exemplary or innovative practice
assisting with the creation of participatory action research sites, described here as demonstrator projects
participating in networking activities, linking networks and initiating new networks and
exploratory scoping of the field of co-creative practices in community arts and media sectors through initiating mapping and database development, and an extensive survey of the remote Indigenous media field.
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:
Establish a baseline of existing links between key community arts and media networks, around which we could structure experiments in seeding new projects and fostering cross-sector collaboration;
Initiate an online community of co-creative practitioners and projects in Australia, which could also be used for identifying and mapping emerging trends in the field;
Identify impediments to sector interoperability and wider adoption of co-creative practice - such as a lack of digital media skills, sector- and platform-specific funding arrangements for CCM activity;
Identify potential case studies that presented innovative models of co-creative practice and collaboration, across the breadth of community-interest media and arts sectors.
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.
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
The forum received media coverage in
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:
Goolarri Media and Kimberley Girl
The Mixing Room Exhibition at the Te Papa Museum (N.Z.)
ACMI Generator
Localore (U.S)
Creative Recovery Network
CitizenJ
All the Best
PBS Ethnomusicology Documentary
The New England and North West Sound Trail
Our True Colours: A Storytelling Project by Women from Refugee Backgrounds
Digistories
Solidarity is not a Crime
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
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.
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
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
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
A key finding to emerge from our research is that there is a very rich and rapidly evolving field of CCM activity that is developing in a space that is bounded by the following sectors and networks:
Community Arts and Cultural Development
Indigenous Media
Community Media
Public Cultural Institutions
Educational Institutions.
These sectors and networks frame a space that is a hothouse of creative energy. CCM activity in Australian is being driven, in the main, by those with links to one, or a number, of these five sectors and networks. Practitioners, producers and cultural professionals operating in these sectors and networks have skills in collaborative storytelling and a passion for new media, and are leaders in an emergent field of cultural activity around facilitated, 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.
CCM is an experimental practice in an era of digital innovation. There is not a lot of research and there are few precedents. Edmond (2013) notes the common themes these diverse practitioners in community-interest media talk about when they reflect on how they are transitioning to an era of participatory culture. There is recognition of:
... the importance of ‘going outside’ and bringing media production into public spaces; turning audiences into participants and turning communities into audiences; collaborating across like-minded sectors; supporting a new kind of convergent ‘ninja’ media producer; and finding new uses for existing assets (p.50).
The challenge to ‘go outside’ was a core mission of the team of Localore community media producers in the U.S. based Association for Independents in Radio (AIR) year-long public media
experiment. This team was mandated with the task of testing new models for multimedia production and community engagement and to trial full spectrum public media, storytelling across three platforms – digital, broadcast and the street. This project’s strength was that it invented a new means to incubate innovation in the “transmediafication” of community media, in a way that is consistent with the traditional focus on community storytelling and public service; a form that is ‘part multimedia production, part community-development blueprint, part new talent cultivation engine’ (Schardt 2012).
The drivers of innovation in the Australian CCM system are operating in a transdisciplinary space and ‘going outside’ in a way that looks like an embryonic form of this experimental approach. Without much in the way of coordination or professional development or infrastructure, much less a funded and planned research and development campaign, Australian CCM practitioners are borrowing, blending and inventing ways of ‘going outside’ formal sectorial boundaries, pushing CCM practice and outcomes into new experimental spaces. Within our research we saw many instances of producers and artists catching a small spark of inspiration – seeking and finding new ways to do something that is part multimedia production, part community development, part new talent cultivation. Practitioners here are driving their own projects and taking responsibility for finding the resources, the skills, the people and the opportunities to experiment and innovate with CCM practice.
There is shared awareness that although CCM practice is an evolving and inventive form, new participatory digital affordances do not necessarily radically change the role and relevance of community driven media. The most vital drivers of innovation in CCM practice are these kinds of digital affordances seen through the lens of the core values of community interest media makers. This has meant, as Edmond (2013, p.59) explains, that CCM practitioners and agents across sectors are involved in an ongoing process of ‘re-assessing the value of existing [sometimes overlooked] assets [such as] one-to-many broadcasting, audiences and consumption, creative talent, professionalism, curation and aggregation, legitimation and intermediation’. This kind of conscious reflection is set against a commitment to the values that support community driven media.
A new and developing self-awareness about what it is that community-driven media does better, and what it does differently, influences the capacity of producers in the CCM system to drive invention. They are adept at making use of accumulated knowledge, refining and distinguishing core values and recognising assets, places, organisations and practitioners in a position to employ new storytelling technologies and methods with nimbleness and a discerning creativity in the service of an articulated social purpose.
The most significant impact of CCM practice is a social one. Some of the most successful innovations, which are pushing the practice into new territory, are about designing for public participation. Such approaches are arising at the intersection of “on the ground” or “street based” facilitated storytelling and the wider field of digital storytelling and media arts practices. These projects lower the barriers for public participation and bring new groups of people to community and CCM, as content creators and as consumers, who are currently not participating. They bring new stories and new groups of storytellers to light.
The
The Mixing Room pushed the boundaries of co-creative practice within a large cultural institution and modelled a practice that privileges partnerships and collaboration with a marginalised
“community of situation”. The curatorial and design team borrowed from other related fields of practice – participatory action research, activism and advocacy, community cultural development, youth development and socially engaged arts to put together a genuinely innovative process.
The ACMI Generator case study (see Appendix D) illustrates how the affordances of participative technologies and social media are being incorporated into the stewardship/preservation functions within a large cultural institution so that a capacity to collaborate in the digital curation of stories may be extended to museum audiences.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne is an iconic, national cultural institution, like Te Papa. Here, various online and offline methods are being incorporated to lower the barriers for public participation in both digital content creation and community controlled curation and meaning making.
This approach characterises a sector-wide shift in museums from a “one-to-many” to a “many-to-many” communication model. In this model, curatorial knowledge acts as a hub around which an online community of interest can build where users are recognised as active cultural participants in the making, valuing and consuming of stories and story collections, and of assigning meaning to these stories and story collections. This process has the potential to delegate power to museum publics and specific communities of storytellers so that they may participate in the processes of discovering community meta-narratives, which may be based on shared experiences and knowledge, shared sense of place, history or experience.
ACMI models a form of collaborative digital curation that balances the responsibilities of institutional stewardship, reinterpreting best practice in digital preservation, metadata, interoperability, and discoverability. Generator, by embracing both the task of preservation and participatory curation, with the challenge of enabling community members to become producers of digital and screen-based stories, rises to this intersecting set of challenges.
The
Novel use of community media and facilitating storytelling to engage those experiencing hardship – where the causes are both long standing and intractable (Indigenous disadvantage, for example), and new or sudden onset (natural disasters, for example) – are becoming increasingly prevalent. These approaches can have significant impacts on community wellbeing, particularly when developed in partnership with local services.
The Indigenous media sector has historically demonstrated the capacity to act as a mobiliser of culture, encouraging local participation in the representation of community life and issues. Social entrepreneurship as a model for supporting CCM activity is also being successfully tested in the Indigenous media sector.
Goolarri Media Enterprises (GME), for example, one of Australia’s most successful and diverse Indigenous media and communications organisations, was able to tap into the unrecognised vitality of young Indigenous women in the community and deploy the resources and infrastructure at hand – skilled staff invested in the communities they serve, communications platforms and event management systems – to help unlock this potential. In the process, GME brought a vital social enterprise to life.
The gift the KG enterprise offers community media researchers, and Australian cultural life as a whole, is two-fold. Firstly, and importantly, KG models how a community media organisation can experiment with creative expressions of identity and attract the attention and support of an entire community. Secondly, KG models how this creativity and unrecognised potential can be developed, in the context of significant resource constraints, and how it can enrich our economic and cultural life as a whole, via social entrepreneurship.
Storytelling, as part of a responsive cultural development approach, can serve as a catalyst for a powerful alliance between community members affected by disasters, arts and cultural development practitioners and service providers.
Arts recovery grew rapidly in the time of this research and employed expanding CCM as a central strategy.
At the time of writing, the online CRN platform had 149 participants, including community organisations and individuals. Within this online network, 594 stories had been assembled from both practitioners and community members and 33 were listed projects. One key learning that emerged in this network, however, was that offline work with communities is often a vital precursor to successfully moving community engagement online. Digital tools are not a magic solution for engagement. Generating genuine community and audience engagement is a slow, step-by-step process, and designing for participation involves attention to relationships, to process and to do leg work. Offline outreach and training can be a crucial gateway for people to become involved in a project, upgrade their digital literacy skills and become motivated to contribute their stories and respond as a cohesive and supportive community to local social and environmental concerns.
The CRN successfully engaged with geographically diverse organisations and projects and provides an accessible online platform for practitioners and community members to participate in sharing knowledge of various arts-related practice, disaster response and best practice models.
This online platform itself has created an online community of practice in this sector, and has united and created valuable discussion around arts-led recovery projects. The digital space is an important one for connecting the CACD sector and highlights the emergence of digital media practice for learning and sharing via online networks. It is a particularly important community for participants to access and to participate in by sharing their work.
CCM activity, although rich, varied and inventive, and although proliferating in an expanding range of sectors and on multiple platforms, has to date escaped meaningful evaluation, since we have yet to invent the forms and tools with which to identify and measure it. Mapping and scoping a field of practice for which there is a distinct lack of descriptors, indicators, benchmarks and measurement mechanisms presents particular challenges and inhibitors for researchers, policy makers and practitioners alike.
Attempts to gain traction in mapping the practice are hampered by the lack of relevant industry agencies and networks to facilitate the collection of this data in a systematic way. Without this data, it becomes difficult to make any meaningful observations about who is making what, where, with whom, with what resources and facing what difficulties, and it is difficult also to gauge the value of this practice in generating creative capital. Although it is clear from this research that powerful social, economic and cultural innovations are flowing from CCM activity, an informed appreciation of the extent to which storytelling and CCM production can contribute in positive ways currently remains out of reach.
The exception to this is the Indigenous media sector. Because of the distinctive funding sources accessed by Indigenous media makers, it was possible to conduct a survey of co-creative output generated by remote Indigenous communities between 2010 and 2013 (see Rennie, 2013). This study yielded interesting results and provocations, demonstrating the diversity of the co-creative field in remote Indigenous communities, embracing the more traditional remote media sector, as well as a range of CACD organisations, Indigenous services and heritage and arts organisations. Paying attention to the kinds of co-creative content that is produced, Rennie also argues that,
… an imperative for research is to understand the implications of grants-based funding, compared to initiatives that determine their own priorities and solutions […] the data shows that a more prescriptive version of remote Indigenous media is emerging – one that describes itself according to social priorities rather than local or cultural interests (p.34).
In the context of diminishing support for Indigenous media makers to develop content of their own determination, this trend, ‘reflects changes in the nation’s relationship with remote Australia, from self-determination to social need’ (p.23).
The case studies and demonstrator projects documented here show that Australian CCM is currently characterised by incredible diversity – at the level of media formats and genres, types of participants, platforms for creation and distribution, and overall aims and goals. The starting point, then, needs to be a rationale for linking these diverse practices and a definition that works to draw a circle around CCM practice. What we have discovered in this research is that self-selection for inclusion in data collection can provide a very useful foundation.
For a complex array of reasons, CCM activity is presently rendered largely invisible. Knowledge of the CACD sector as a whole remains difficult to aggregate for a variety of factors identified throughout this report. One important factor is that, like the Co-Creative Media System proposed here, CACD is a diffuse field of activity; it is not necessarily a unified sector for public policy purposes. Some activities might qualify for consideration as arts and others as welfare, media, education, or other kinds of social activities. As illustrated by the experience of the New England and North West Sound Trail (Appendix E) the mechanisms, or forms, of community-based media arts (communications platforms, storytelling, creative expression), understood as instruments for cultural and economic development, may not gain traction in any policy domain.
The state of knowledge of the CACD sector contrasts with community broadcasting, which is clearly defined in policy terms by the necessity to coordinate and manage the use of radiofrequency spectrum. Solid empirical descriptions of the Australian community broadcasting sector are regularly generated through an ongoing research effort. For example, a
Funding programs and policy frameworks are working to come to terms with contemporary trendsin hybrid community and co-creative media content production in different ways. Australian CCMpractice is emergent, and its cross-sector status limits access to government funding and support,which tends to be sector-specific. Sector-specific funding and support needs to acknowledge boththe historical practices of connecting with communities within particular cultural sectors, along withthe multi-platform reality of the Australian community media landscape. The increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of CCM producers, practitioners and artists means they frequently fall outsideexisting funding programs.
Resources for CCM production are unevenly allocated across the range of sites where innovation is occurring. Consequently, CCM activity in the community media, CACD and cultural heritage sectors is not supported by links to common funding agencies or government policy, and this inhibits collaboration and knowledge sharing, as well as impeding the wider adoption of co-creative production methods.
Independent, trans-disciplinary producers who are well positioned to drive innovation across the breadth of community-interest media, frequently lack support to progress vibrant new ideas and collaborations, as they slip between the gaps in funding and infrastructure. The journalistic, documentary or broadcast nature of much co-creative content, for example, likely makes it ineligible for most arts grants. And the major screen and broadcasting funds favour professional content, which makes CCM unlikely to qualify (this is especially pronounced in the area of remote Indigenous media (see Rennie, 2013, p.33).
The CCM system proposed here arises from an array of critical participatory media movements such as social documentary, community radio, video access and open source. However, it is still very young and it has yet to be constituted formally by institutions, industry bodies, funding agencies, government policy or economic models. Subsequently, CCM presently falls between policy frameworks, industry bodies and funding categories. While such fluidity is a fertile environment for invention, some supported capacity across the system to seed experimentation and cross-sector collaborations, and to encourage and support the development of social enterprises with a CCM focus, would have powerful implications.
The digital capacity of community-engaged media practitioners is uneven, and professional development, mentoring and knowledge sharing is hampered by resource constraints. CCM practitioners who have socially engaged and experimental mindsets can be vitally interested in trialing new technologies, methods and platforms for CCM production and distribution, and can imagine new forms of participatory content, but in most sectors progressing innovative approaches is impeded by a digital skills deficit. Except for the very top tier of organisations (who do nonetheless provide critical opportunities for skill development), most community-engaged practitioners struggle to access training and support to maintain dynamically relevant digital media skills.
Pip Shea (2013, 2014) argues that in addition to co-creating art and media, ‘knowledge co-creation’ is another latent capability of the community artist. Drawing on applied research and engaging with the Sydney-based organisation
… new policies and guidelines around professional development initiatives that encourage agility, prototyping, techno-pragmatism, sharing cultures, new organisational practices, and the critical assembly of technology […] models that encourage play, insight derived from failure, and other methods that nurture praxis and contribute to a new lexicon for the sector. (2014, p. 254).
Enterprising approaches to addressing skills and knowledge development have emerged from the community broadcasting sector, notably with the establishment of pathways into formal training and accreditation. The largest Registered Training Organisation (RTO) in the sector is the CI Christina Spurgeon is a Director of the CMTO. The views expressed here are not those of the CMTO.
A range of cultural institutions, including the Galleries, Libraries and Museums sector, and public service broadcasters and independent producers, have also entered the community media domain. While they do not rely on broadcasting infrastructure, they nonetheless contribute to the expansion of community media, often relying on CCM approaches and methods, as well as digital media, to do so. This activity often includes an informal learning focus for participants (for example,
The need to improve digital media capacity was also identified through the
A digital skills shortage was also observed by researchers during follow up investigations, which tracked the CCM demonstrator projects as they progressed from initial conception to production. Practitioners demonstrated considerable interest in experimenting with new methods and platforms for CCM production and distribution, and an ability to creatively imagine new forms of participatory content, but, frustratingly for them and the partnership projects they had initiated, ambition often outpaced capacity and resources.
The CCM system can also be understood as a field of social learning where offline community engagement occurs and where skills for online social participation are developed through a diverse array of informal customised and context-aware learning opportunities accessible on a population-wide basis. Most of the actors involved in the case studies and in the demonstrator project profiled in this research were acutely aware of the skills development occurring as their CCM initiative evolved. A more self-conscious appreciation of the critical nature of this learning across the CCM making system – learning that is both formal and informal – and more investment in mentoring (see the Australia Council’s
Across the CCM system, practitioners and organisations are grappling in intricate ways with the terms and nuances of ethical engagement with storytellers and communities, and with negotiating the rights of co-creative partners in storytelling projects. Most organisations and practitioners acknowledge the complexity of managing intellectual property (IP) in CCM practice, and many express some anxiety about the rights of all parties beyond the most obvious here-and-now concerns, fully aware that technology raises complex questions about story ownership and control over representation.
In this way, the practical politics of negotiating the ownership of CCM outputs are being explored and tested by the organisations and practitioners we encountered in this study, and further study would help us to understand the impact of IP laws and protocols on CCM forms. The answer to what constitutes best practice around IP ownership in CCM activity is a highly contingent one. There is no simple solution to managing the IP arising from critical CCM activity that is simultaneously legal, administratively manageable and fair to storytellers as well as the interests of facilitating involved professionals (for example, artists and producers). This is a key finding of this research in relation to copyright approaches and practices.
There are many reasons why this approach to copyright appeals to CCM facilitators and producers (for example, Lambert, 2013, p.193). Pre-existing licences provide an ‘off the shelf’ solution for under-resourced practitioners and has some capacity for easy adaptation to suit specific circumstances of a given project or production. Creative Commons licensing also provides a pedagogic strategy for helping storytellers to better understand when it is legal for them to make use of other people’s work (including other works also licensed under Creative Commons).
A more fine-grained reflection on the implications of ownership of creative content that emerges from analysing CCM practice shows that CCM practice is also an applied critical research practice, if we are able to pay attention to the outcomes. It has the potential to expand the terms of the debate about copyright, moral rights and intellectual property beyond commercial interests and ground the discussion in ethics, creativity and power. Co-creative methods, according to Spurgeon (2014, p.3),
... are philosophically committed to enabling and legitimating the truth claims of unheard voices. They favour first person storytelling and story ownership, but when we get down to the nitty gritty of copyright questions the picture becomes much more complex. Quite often there is direct alignment of IP ownership and storytellers. But just as often there is not.
The Yijala Yala Project, for example, is a long-term, inter-generational cultural arts project based in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, created by
….seeks to highlight cultural heritage as living, continually evolving and in the here and now, rather than of the past, and works with community members to create content and develop skills that assist in communicating their cultural heritage to a wide audience. The name Yijala Yala was chosen to reflect the focus of the project: Yijala means ‘now’ in Ngarluma; Yala means ‘now’ in Yindjibarndi – the two dominant Aboriginal languages spoken in Ieramagadu (Roebourne). [...] Since late 2010, Yijala Yala Project artists have run workshops and developed a vast variety of works with the Roebourne community, relating to
In an interview, a project worker from big hART described the licensing arrangements that were applied to the stories/artworks produced for Yijala Yala in this way:
Permissions are sought to produce the artworks from the prescribed representative bodies of the two language groups of the community. In the case of the storybooks, of which there are 3 different writers/authors, a writer’s agreement is drawn up with the author/teller so that copyright remains with them and they are responsible for any future licensing requests that may arise. In the case of the comic, the story is fictional, created by the Big hART artists in consultation and collaboration with the community – copyright sits with the community to be managed by the two traditional owner groups (Debra Myers 2012, Research Interview)
This kind of layered and customised copyright arrangement demonstrates that in this project, like many others that we encountered, project facilitators are centring their practice on a heightened awareness of the potential for ‘story theft’ (Kuddell 2012). CCM producers and local storytellers are able to work positively with Indigenous knowledge protocols when the process is based on trust and relationships. In this situation these understandings become enablers of CCM production. Negotiations around story ownership are principle-based rather than regulatory, and the partners value the quality of the interaction more than the ticking of boxes.
While it is clear that in many projects CCM productions are contingent on the voluntary participation of storytellers, it is also acknowledged that these outcomes are facilitated by highly skilled digital media artists, CCM practitioners and producers. These are practitioners who are personally committed to community cultural development and who seek creative excellence, often in difficult circumstances that offer uncertain economic rewards. The practices we encountered showed a range of other shared rights arrangements, beside creative commons, between professional creative practitioners, the individual storytellers and communities with which they collaborate, media outlets, exhibitors and funders.
In the debate about representation, voice and power in participatory video, nowhere is the stakes higher than in the kind of human rights work that is undertaken by WITNESS. WITNESS is a Brooklyn-based, international, non-profit organisation that ‘trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose human rights abuse and fight for human rights change’ (WITNESS n.d.). This activity and the thinking emerging around activist CCM, the ideas around acknowledging a ‘responsibility to the story’, can be seen to be at the cutting edge of applied research into the complexity of copyright and ethical engagement with storytellers. As Paul Gready (2010, p.186) noted as part of this conversation:
Trust, painstakingly constructed and forged in the intimacy of safe spaces, such as interviews, can easily be violated within an ever expanding public sphere, as the distance between narration and reception grows in time and space. With voice can come a sense of power; the lack of control over representation in human rights reports, advocacy and fundraising materials, the media or elsewhere, can mark a return to powerlessness. The issues of ownership and control of the story in a globalized public sphere raise important ethical questions that need to be addressed by academics and activists alike. How do we react when the victim speaks and then regrets having spoken? How do we respond to the often arbitrary way in which certain stories acquire attention while others do not? How do we extend our ethical codes beyond the moment when the story is first told, to the subsequent moments when it is retold?
The work of human rights activists using CCM practices highlights the need for an ‘anticipatory faculty’ that draws our attention to the way stories that are shared with a specific purpose in mind (exposing violence against women, for example) can be reproduced and shared in contexts that do not honour this intention. This is one of the ethical complexities that CCM practitioners are now encountering. Sam Gregory, WITNESS program director who presented at the Co-Creative Communities Forum in Melbourne, has speculated on how we may begin adapting the tools we currently have to rise to this challenge. He talks about work WITNESS is doing to consider:
…. how the current system of Creative Commons licenses — focused primarily on paradigms of commercial/non–commercial and share–alike/adapt — might be adapted to create a licensing system that recognizes intentionality. Such a system would place greater value on the questions of intention than on considerations of monetary value or the artistic integrity of the original material, emphasizing the desire to see a piece of visual media spread while still holding onto the motivations underlying its creation. For example, a piece of media might have an intention license that noted, “You may use this video in any way you like, provided you push for redress for violence against women in the Central African Republic.” WITNESS has been looking practically at how such information might be embedded in media items via its collaboration with the Guardian Project on new metadata standards. (Gregory and Losh, 2012)
The current research suggests that there are at least two layers of ethical responsibilities that CCM practitioners may need to consider. These may be framed as:
A responsibility to the storytellers (in terms of protecting IP and licensing)
A responsibility to the story (in terms of recognising intentionality).
In spite of impediments, the CCM system is well positioned to creatively embrace the challenge of proto-typing forms, content and platforms of “transmediafication”. For this potential to be realised, coordination, cross sector collaborations and investment in research and development is critical. Professional bodies and networks that link practitioners and smaller community media stations and organisations have the unique potential to act as a catalysts for system-wide innovation, if they are resourced enough to initiate and coordinate creative models to push practices into new transmedia territory.
The U.S. based
Localore began with US$2 million in funding, sourced from philanthropic and public sources but with the aim of building interest in sustained funding for innovation after the funded period concluded. The projects that resulted from this year-long experiment showed producers employing eclectic and ground-breaking transmedia formats for documenting small-town stories all over the U.S. In essence, the Localore legacy is an ingenious and disruptive solution for injecting inspiration into the public media sector through a research and development and capacity building program driven by bottom up, producer-led innovation.
In Australia, CCM producers are under-recognised as valuable agents of change and innovation. Their value lies in the fact that they frequently embody critical qualities for agile adaptation to volatile conditions, such as highly developed negotiation skills, entrepreneurial flair and a “hacker” mentality.
The Localore experiment showed that outcomes, including new models for “full spectrum” storytelling, innovations in designing for participation in a digital age and the insights for producers and stations managers, are all valuable. However, the success of this model for research and development itself is also part of the story. AIR director Sue Schardt underscores the radical nature of the way Localore recognised “talent”, and how the whole project concept turns ninja-like on this recognition. Observing how Silicon Valley tech accelerators operate, Schardt notes that she ‘sees a lot of parallels to the lightweight, innovative, networked structure she’s been trying to create in the world of broadcast’. In recruiting independent producers – who are unencumbered by institutional mindsets, who are ‘driven by their own electricity’ (their passion for public service media), who are masters at collaboration, negotiation and persuasion, who are undaunted by risk and often working on the edge of existing practices – the project was undergirded by an idealism and nimbleness that served as an energising force. Our contact over the course of this research with talented, passionate independent producers in the CCM field in Australia shows that such an energising force is already breaking new ground, but it is an under-developed resource.
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.
Funding and support for the development of remote Indigenous content, such as the recent
Funding mechanisms to support the CCM system in general could be more responsive to the rise of trans-disciplinary independent producers across the whole system. The addition of programs of support for storytelling and producers of storytelling, rather than only supporting medium-specific or sector-specific content, would help to energise this hybrid practice. Initiatives aimed at stimulating inventive CCM strategies that can rise to the challenge of digital participatory cultures and transmedia design could usefully hone in on the independent CCM producer. Research and development across the CCM system is currently an
Traditional approaches to audience research are limited in what they can offer CCM producers in an era of participatory digital culture. Likewise, top down approaches to data collection that rely on preset descriptors and benchmarks risk reinforcing gaps and misinterpretations in our understanding of this grass roots, evolving practice. A mapping and data collection process that is driven by those active in the CCM system, that uses a bottom-up, participatory action research approach of the type modelled by the
There is a clear need for ongoing investment in digital training and mentoring throughout the CCM system. Existing digital mentoring and support for training initiatives need to be maintained and, ideally, expanded in ways that can offer support to individual practitioners, not just projects and small organisations. Recognition for the top level organisations tasked with undertaking the lion’s share of digital experimentation in co-creative practice and platform development may encourage them to take on this role of mentorship and project startup support in a more coordinated and strategic way.
CCM projects are currently performing a valuable role in creating broad-based social (informal) learning opportunities for digital participation. Social learning opportunities created via CCM projects can offer a genuine pathway for wider participation in formal education and contribute to building a population-wide capacity for critical literacy in digital culture. Offline training and the responsive community-focused processes characteristic of community cultural development work have vital potential for building the foundations for this kind of inclusive learning. As Shea (2014) notes, social learning opportunities are also critical for practitioners who stand to gain from professional development in networked learning approaches. This kind of skills development can ‘foster the organizing activities that underpin online co-creation, [since] new ways of connecting enable new modes of peer-to-peer production and exchange’ (Shea, 2014, p.37).
During this research we found plenty of evidence that CCM is being taken up in other service sectors – such as education, health and allied services. Examining the benefits that these approaches bestow both for students, clients, participants and professional alike, however, was beyond the scope of the current research. Useful information could follow from research that focused on the nature of the partnerships being formed and the way CCM activities in these contexts are designed, implemented and disseminated. Longitudinal studies that chart the degree of positive impact generated by short-term projects and partnerships over time would also yield useful information. When focusing on CCM practice, it becomes apparent that this particular creative activity often arises from creative partnerships that are distinctly cross-disciplinary. CCM articulates with both the services sector and the wider creative economy in ways we have yet to map and describe. For this reason the current research indicates that further investigation focusing on CCM activity would reveal important insights into the ways cultural practices intersect with wider economic and social systems.
In addition, there are early indications that social financing for CCM is a phenomenon worth exploring. A review of international and local models for social enterprises with CCM outputs could examine the consequences of this approach for policy and for practice.