Verde Smoke

I create media because not only to express my voice, but also to join communities. The participatory media tools I use, such as online social networks and make-your-own video games, are fueled by the principles of collaboration, personal creation, iteration, accessibility, and sustainability.

When I’m asked to teach other how to use these tools, I try to form collaborative spaces focused on both self-expression and collective gain. In my ideal community, both of these values would be at the center. Upon reflection, I’ve realized that my actions as a creator and facilitator are often compelled by the tension I feel when this ideal isn’t the reality.

After some time working on the ground in non-profit organizations, I’ve realized that youth development organizations especially share the same values and also experience many of the same tensions. The immediate need for stability sometimes makes it hard for an organization to align their shared assumptions and espoused values to actions. The ideals they express become misaligned from everyday practice. Any new tools that align with the values but not the actions can feel threatening or burdensome. So unlike my own experience with new participatory media tools, youth organizations can perceive them as one-off projects that aren’t sustainable or an insurmountable challenge to integrate as an everyday tool.

I began to understand this tension was an opportunity. As a nomadic facilitator, I could bring new technical tools and skills, but also a community building mindset focused on understanding values and ideals. I soon discovered that a real space for knowledge generation grew out of collaborative interactions with my peer practitioners and media experts.

So I approached two particular organizations in Lawrence and Bangalore, looking for not only need and perhaps misalignment, and at least a hope for media as a tool for change. In the context of writing my master thesis, I decided the output of my actions wouldn’t just be media content or new youth social networks, but also a personal articulated set of facilitation methods to negotiate an organization’s cultural tensions and collaborative reassess alignment of actions to shared values.