Amplified Leicester

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The Leicester Family - an Amplified Leicester miniproject

Introducing an Amplified Leicester miniproject! 

This exciting initiative invites people from Leicester to share stories and experiences of family life. The Leicester Family project will explore the realities of family life in Leicester and assess how families have changed through the decades.

The project is looking to record people’s experiences of family life in Leicester, celebrate what it was was like in the past, capture what it’s like today, as well as imagine what families will be like in the future.

A selection of entries will be chosen to represent The Leicester Family for an online digital book which will be designed and produced by April 1st 2010. Entries can be presented through any creative form, from song to poetry, drawings to photo, capturing one of the four themes: The family - defined, The family and Decisions, The Family and Leisure and The Family at Dinner Time. The project will be blogging inspirational ideas to make entries sparkle, until the end of February.

To find out more you can visit http://www.leicesterfamily.org or find the project on Myspace, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Ning.com and Youtube by typing in Leicester Family. Entries will need to be emailed to competition@leicesterfamily.org by 21st March 2010.

Discussion Session with Thilo Boeck – Session 8, 11th February 2010

Session 8 concentrated on providing feedback on the research carried out by Thilo Boeck , Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Action at De Montfort University and the social researcher attached to this project. Thilo has been observing the group and collecting survey data over the last few months and in this session he shared his findings with everyone and asked for feedback.

The session started with a quick recap of the Amplified Leicester project and Thilo highlighted why the research element was an important factor of the process. He then invited participants to share their thoughts and opinions of the session by voicing them or using posttits to jot down comments which he collected at the end of the workshop. 

 He organised a number of short exercises and asked everyone to rate a set of prepared statements such as ‘the project has enhanced our social media skills’. He posted four smiley face icons around the room which represented a scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The group was asked to stand next to the poster which reflected their opinion which was then followed by a short discussion. The exercises focused on individual experience, trust, diversity, and statistics. Overall the session proved to be highly productive and useful for the participants. 

The morning ended with five minute elevator pitches from the leaders of the selected miniprojects and resulted in each group recruiting even more members. The projects are now well underway.

Amplified Leicester Miniprojects

Amplified Leicester participants have started work on three miniprojects designed to put what they're learning into practice. More news as they develop!

Guerilla QR Codes
This project utilizes the technology of QR codes to link mobile phone users easily and quickly both from and to sources of rich media content specific to their location or environment. Key objectives are to expand the usage and engagement of citizens of Leicester in this form of technology.[Sarah Eaton & Mike Wilkinson]

The Leicester Family
A social media project exploring realities of family life in the city. The project will use crowdsourcing to collate material from poems to photos that explore this theme and will feature a selection of entries in an online page flip book. It's the first in a series of projects to be collected together under the banner Leicester Through The Decades [Farhana Shaikh with Sharon Bown]

#leicesteronthemap
A simple experiment to try to demonstrate the global connectedness of Leicester. Members of the public will ask their friends, families and contacts around the world to take a photo of themselves holding a #leicesteronthemap or #leicester hashtag and these pictures will be plotted on a world map. [Ben Ravilious]

Amplified Leicester welcomes Chris Meade and Toni Lebusque – Digital ways to tell short stories – Session 7, 28th January 2010

The session looked at content, and this week's workshop was led by Chris Meade and Toni Lebusque of if:book a think and do tank based in London exploring the potential of new media for creative readers and writers and the future of the book in the digital age.

Chris believes that the future of content is about short snippets of video, and drew our attention to the explosion of micro films available online. He talked about the ways people orchestrate the stories they tell about their communities, and Toni  illustrated this with a series of her own short video stories. The group explored the art of storyboarding and teamed up to create one minute shorts to be scripted for video.  Inspired by Chris and Toni's approach, some participants used their Flip cams to film materials there and then.

Ross uploaded some storyboards from his team:

Storyboard 1 

Storyboard 2

Toni's recommended  links:

www.100words.com

www.archive.org

Amplification Open Authorship – Session 7, 28th January 2010

This week's Amplification was Open Authorship; ease with creating content for immediate public consumption and modification. Armed with Flip cameras since last week the group spent some time sharing their homework of video footage. There was a broad range of content in some great short videos! We discussed the best way to shoot and edit video and talked about the knotty problem of placing videos of children in public online spaces. Follow the growing collection of videos here.

This was followed by a feedback session on the mini-project proposals. We could have spent all day discussing these fascinating ideas. The projects to be taken forward will be announced next week.