We're in our 250th Witnessing Revolution diary as I write this. Periodically, we step back and think about how we can improve our presentation and our behind the scenes processes, whilst maintaining an ethos of witnessing in the live comment streams.
The flurry of activity around the fall of Tripoli brought new energy to our diaries and with that some new inputs which are sparking ideas. I'll present one that I have below the fold. Will you check it out and offer your thoughts, ideas and willingness to assist?
Background
From the early days of the Witnessing diaries we've been talking about improving the "resource lists", so that more people can find their way to information on their own. We haven't updated lists of good twitter accounts or hashtags to follow in quite a while, for instance. We constantly learn of which journalists to follow for different countries and new youtube channels from citizen journalists, etc.
But we're a small group of volunteers. We learned early on that we had to set boundaries for each person's efforts or we would not be able to carry on. So, right now the author of a new Witnessing update, focuses on putting together the highlights. This is no mean task since we try our best to find pictures, videos, audio and writing from people on the ground rather than from professional media outlets. We've had to deal with finding good resources and then losing them due to government blocking, etc. So, gathering three sets of highlights per week is a fair amount of work.
This means that we have a separate effort for gathering those country by country news citations you see below the fold. That is done in a wiki. Several people are scanning for citations constantly. As it gets close to a publishing deadline, one of those people gathers them from the individual country pages and updates the listings in the diary template. When the author is ready to publish she does a copy and paste. Voila, those comprehensive diaries you see magically appear! The beauty of teamwork.
There is a reason that the gathering and culling of citations is done in the background rather than live in the comments of a diary. We try to preserve the comment experience for witnessing energy. That is we focus on bearing witness, not on the technical production of diaries. This would be akin to the difference between going to an hour long meditation session and having it interrupted every few minutes to discuss pillows or beads or joking about how you feel about your belly, rather than meditating for the hour in the meditation room and moving to a different space to have those conversations. We try to keep the comment area as our witnessing meditation and go to a different space to process the technical, production, self-evaluation stuff or do our socializing. (We're human, so there certainly isn't any perfection. Still, it is our intention.)
The Idea
I mention all of that because of an idea we've had, in the wake of some really good energy around researching twitter and how google maps might enrich the experience. This energy has reminded us to consider our need for a dynamic resource library. Some of us are envisioning a place (a diary of it's own? a wiki?) where people can talk about resources they are finding and how to use tools which are out there. Someone, or a team, can be collating lists of country-relevant twitter feeds or youtube channels or maps, as well as a more generalized list of tools, resources or how-to's, keeping the resource list as up-to-date as possible. If this were it's own document, the team maintaining it can work at whatever pace they manage and the Witnessing diaries themselves could simply link to that. This would assure that the author publishing the diary doesn't have an extra load of work keeping up with the latest changes, additions, etc.
This would allow the exploration of tools and gathering of resources to be robust without diluting the Witnessing energy.
The Call
Our current team can't manage that diary. We're at our operational limit. (remember, we're all volunteers.)
Will you offer to work on this?
Do you think it's a good idea?
Do you have other ideas for ways to enrich the Witnessing series?
This is place for that meta....