Communities Solving Problems & Telling Stories
One of the best ways to scale up successful social projects is to celebrate that success through compelling narratives. The goal of Citizen Creator is to develop a platform that enables individuals, non-profits and businesses who are doing good work to capture their own stories. The platform would provide grassroots "citizen creators" with:
- Online tools and methodologies for capturing, editing, and distributing stories using social media and digital media
- Opportunities to collaborate and participate in documenting projects
- An archival process that preserves digital narratives for future generations
- A “campfire” where success stories generate potential for solving the problems most important to Americans.
Faces and Voices
We hope to document the faces and voices of American people contributing to the economic, social and cultural well-being of their community. Citizen Creators might be volunteers at the local level, employees donating time to corporate social responsibility projects, professionals doing pro bono work, and project staff working to address a wide range of social issues, from jobs and economic development to healthcare, education, culture, energy and the environment.
Story Capture
The Citizen Creator platform includes Story Capture, a social media tool for chronicling volunteer projects, corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity, and non-profit initiatives. Story Capture looks and works like many common blog systems, but provides tools that enable users to easily convert blog posts into compelling stories, articles or web pages including photos, video and other types of digital media.
Supporting Your Project & Organizational Goals
Many organizations (non-profit and commercial, alike) are beginning to realize the value of using blogs and other forms of social media to communicate with clients, customers, external and intenal audiences. Although use is becoming more widespread, much of the content generated for this purpose is created on an ad hoc basis and sporadically, at best. Content tends to mimic traditional means of office communication – bulletins, opinions and conversation – rather than taking advantage of all the benefits digital platforms have to offer. The Citizen Creator concept encourages you to describe your work through sustained narratives that demonstrate how your idea, project or business is truly different from others. Story content is easily repurposed for use in annual reports, on websites, in recruitment collateral, in advertising or presentations. When it’s time to formalize your story in another context, you have media-rich content ready to go.
Access and visibility
Content contributed to Citizen Creator stories belongs to the original authors or sponsoring organizations, and of course permissions must be obtained for interviews and photography. But the value of stories is in communicating with the widest possible audience, and we encourage organizations to think about preparing for access and reuse of the material by agreeing to the principles of Creative Commons licensure. For more information about the benefits of Creative Commons licensure, please visit http://creativecommons.org.
Citizen Creator is a project of Learning Worlds Institute.
