Full Circle Associates

In this week's The Drum Beat there is a great article on "Video for Development Communication. First, if you don't know about the Drum Beat, run, don't walk your fingers to http://www.comminit.com. It is an amazing resource on the application of communication tools and processes to development needs. Elizabeth Wickett, documentary filmmaker and sociologist consultant for development projects wrote:

Video is an essential tool for planners in agricultural innovation or infrastructure projects such as water and sanitation. Video has an important mandate: to capture voices and communicate their ideas to planners, especially women's voices in societies in which social interaction is bifurcated along gender lines."

Video can be a powerful part of an online experience as well. Look at how the Microsoft Developers Network are using it - for me it is putting a human face on what I generally charactarize as the borg. How is that changing my experience of Microsoft? (Scoble's blog, btw, does the same thing in text, so I'm not saying the only way to do this is video.) Take a peek at Andy Carvin's interweaving of video in his blog.

This past Spring working with Project Harmony in Armenia, I took a series of video clips of the project staff telling their highlights of our project. My motivation was they did not quite appreciate how unique and powerful their work was. Now I an "carry" their voices to tell the story. And then report back the impact of their work on others. (Which reminds me, I need to process that video and get it on the net!)

Bottom line: how do we decide when to augment text for a different experience? What does it add? When is it a waste? Are the individual perceptions of video significant? What of bandwidth? Lots of interesting questions. If you have any great pointers, please post a comment!