Stories to change the world

Care to hear a story?

I’ve been having a conversation with myself (and a few others, admittedly) about the power of stories. Given that stories are often big culture influencers, I want to understand whether stories can be used as a tool to help direct and lead millennials, specifically in a work environment. That was my initial thought. As stories do, this one has evolved along the way.

After being exceedingly fortunate to spend 3 jam-packed days in Buenos Aires, attending Media Party 2014, (enormous thanks to Code4SA and African Media Initiative (AMI)) I have come back with a renewed respect for stories and their place and their power to transform.

Something needs to be done

Media Party is a Hacks/Hackers event seeking to facilitate collaboration between, and build a community of journalists and technologists who, together, can reenvision the news and information industries. And I am increasingly grateful as I come to appreciate what an important role these people play. If stories conjure cultures and weave communities together, then it is our social responsibility to ensure that accurate and relevant stories are being shared.

I am struck by how much I take news and reporting for granted. Ashamedly, I assume a right to be informed at the right time in a format appropriate to me. All too often I accept the information being presented to me as being factually accurate and where it doesn’t ring true, more often than not, I don’t bother following up to verify the facts.

The honest truth is that the state of access to information is currently in distress. Without technologists liberating data, and journalists understanding how best to use and display this data, we would be stuck regurgitating the same over-contrived fables time and time again. This is one of the reasons I felt truly blessed to be able to attend Media Party and hear some ideas currently changing the world.

Something is being done

How refreshing to hear Brian Boyer share his tips on how to be happy at work (and has recently started a tumblr dedicated to this topic). His emphasis on writing a team blog, specifically sharing the Why? behind ideas and decisions, ensures that ideas are distilled and clarified. Like How? trumps What?, Why? is where we can best share the underlying motivation behind something and in doing so hopefully share a thought process for reuse by others at a later stage. Dan Sinker’s plea to share our work (moving beyond simply releasing the source and saying it’s open) served as a perfect complement to Brian’s keynote. The call is to make our work useable and discoverable, beyond simply being open.

I was honoured to be able to partake in a discussion about measuring ROI (and perhaps revisiting the definition of success) for civic projects, lead by our very own Greg Kempe.

Beyond ideas and philosophies, I was also witness to some inspiring tech. A few of my personal highlights include:

• Open Democracy OS aims to upgrade politics by opening up conversations to citizens and crowd-sourcing opinions for representation.
• Hyperaud.io takes the pain out of editing multiple media formats into a new creation.
• Outernet aims to become “humanity’s public library”.
• Census Reporter provides visualisations and a user interface for navigating and consuming census data. It’s what our own Wazimap is based on - check it out and understand our country a little better. :)

Our responsibility is to share the right stories

Media Party showed me that there are still people who care deeply out there and more than that, they are actively making a difference and inspiring and collaborating with others to do the same. I left inspired, with renewed hope in our species and a deeper respect for the humble story.

My commitment to myself, and those I share with, is to share the right stories (the ones people need to hear). The ones which will, over time, gain momentum and change the world.

Stories bring us together, unite us with a common goal and vision. Let’s use that to shape the society we want to participate in.