18DaysinEgypt is a project just announced that fuses citizen journalism and documentary, “to tell the story of the Egyptian revolution with the same tools that helped share it with the world in realtime…a crowd-sourced interactive documentary of the events in Egypt from #Jan25 to #Feb11…
The call to action asks those involved to, “Imagine a timeline that includes yours and everyone else’s shared experience as the revolution unfolded…With thousands of hours of footage recorded during this historic event in addition to social media updates, we believe that there is a wonderful story to be told of the pulse of the movement, minute by minute.”
The approach is simple; invite people to tag content that’s already on You Tube and Flickr - to draw it together and make sense of it through location, date, theme. Meanwhile an uploader is in development to draw in tweets and media from other platforms.
While the team behind 18DaysinEgypt are US based, the project has local support – it’s been promoted on the Egyptian platform Beena. To make it work, they’re going to need to reach and involve the many people who made the media, and will no doubt need to demonstrate that they can be entrusted to tell such an important story. As well as the interactive proposition, a feature documentary is envisaged. It could be fantastic. I look forward to seeing how 18daysinEgypt evolves.
