Digital storytelling in Sri Lanka – a preliminary discussion of evaluation

Introduction to Michael and his environment

Michael David has been involved long term in community development projects in Sri Lanka and is part of a network of concerned family, friends and colleagues who do whatever they can to access funds, provoke discussion and thinking, or undertake projects. Michael and colleagues are maven-like in making applications to donors, bringing people together, starting debates. All of this takes place within a highly politicised and polarised environment in Sri Lanka, where the long-running conflict gets taken up in daily relations between people, and where every initiative can be perceived to be supporting this side or that side. To a large extent, all lives are governed by the war.

The development environment in Sri Lanka is full of activists, all of whom have their own particular understanding of what the country needs for its development, and some of whom are prepared to be very militant in putting forward their ideas. This will always constrain what Michael can and can’t say in public, whom he invites to his workshops, and with whom he is seen to be forming alliances.

Michael’s interest in KM4Dev is informed by his view that local politics is constrained by limited ways of understanding. He feels he can make a developmental and a political contribution to the situation in his country if he can broaden people’s understandings of ways of seeing, can facilitate their access to different knowledges. Being fluent in English, for example, can open up whole new worlds. He is also modest in his aspirations: he realises that he is not going to change the world, but is feeling his way forward gradually, with others, pursuing his enthusiasms.

The meeting with Mike Powell at an OU conference on KM4Dev was an ideal opportunity, for bringing two experimental entrepreneurs together and to direct another resource to help further Michael’s long term thinking and activities.

The IKME project

Michael is taking an experimental approach to developing digital story-telling (DS). Having worked for many years as a journalist and in radio MD became interested in pictures and moving pictures. He is sceptical that many of the reports that get written ever get read, not just by the communities they often concern, but even by the institutions that are involved in development. He was keen to think about a YouTube type space for digital storytelling but one which was an independent platform.

Being unclear about how to proceed with this Michael agreed with Mike to organise a conference in Bangalore through IT4Change, an Indian NGO with experience of KM4Dev. It brought a number of practitioners together to help focus discussion on some of the important themes around digital storytelling. Two important ideas emerged for Michael to inform his thinking.

1)     as a medium of expression DS promotes collective reflection and discussion: it aids local politics. Unlike in the West where a three minute video may elicit barely a flicker from those who have watched it, where DS has been used extensively in Asia it can stimulate debate for days.

2)     Where in the domain of international development there is usually a push to disseminate information as widely as possible, communities engaged in DS have been very aware of the need to safeguard against intrusion. Communities are much more conscious of the power of the medium for disruption.

Michael has been working long term with a community in the hill country of Sri Lanka where he helped them develop a radio station. They have already been doing some DS funded by another agency and he wanted to discover what skills they have been developing as a consequence. He has always been interested in how such initiatives can be financially sustainable: how might skills transfer be a way of generating income for the community?

From these discussions and combining his interest in radio and pictures, Michael has developed the idea of telradio, internet radio accompanied by pictures which would make the radio station ‘sticky’ . In order to explore these ideas with others interested in similar areas of work, Michael organised a two day workshop in Colombo on DS for knowledge management and invited a wide range of participants. Some of these have already been doing DS and felt they had learnt nothing new, while others were inspired by what they heard and determined to push forward with their own initiatives.

The workshop highlighted three themes of work for Michael which he wants to pursue: 1) DS, 2) DS and internet radio 3) digital storytelling and maps. He has started working with a group in Kandy to develop telradio  and has been discussing this with Sri Lankan activists in Canada, London and Paris to see how to take it forward. The idea is to provide content in local radio then to research what happens as a consequence. How do communities take up the offer? Michael describes his research method as ‘nebular’: finding a cluster of people interested in what he’s interested in then helping the nebula to rotate to see what happens and what it throws out. For example, a group at a university have started their own telradio as a consequence of the workshop and Michael will follow up with them to see how it proceeds. Another group intend using internet radio for their project on Aids. Some university teachers have started enquiring how they might us DS to publish their work and make it more available to the public. A group of librarians have become interested in how DS might promote story telling and access to traditional stories. Some surplus funds left over from the tsunami has allowed a group to think how they might use DS to assist with risk mitigation.

Next steps and what we might evaluate

By July Michael wants to have developed a workplan which will aim to map out the development of certain products as a result of the work and thinking to date. One of these products will be a series of interviews he would like to commission with people already engaged with DS which can be published on ChilliMango, the project blog.

When we discussed how we might evaluate what Michael is doing we agreed that the method he is using, developing his thinking in an experimental way with others, is something worth documenting. Rather than starting out with a plan in advance of undertaking the work, Michael is incrementally developing a plan. How is his thinking changing over time? It would also be worth keeping track of some of the spin-offs from the workshops that he has held to date: who has approached him as a result of these and why does he choose to work with some groups rather than others? At the point where he decides to develop certain products it would be worth paying attention to how they develop and thinking about how we might assess their impact.

We also began a discussion about how we might contract a researcher in Sri Lanka to help with this assessment of impact at a later stage. Michael and I will keep in contact over the period, infrequently but regularly, to review how the project is developing.