Storyelling publishes digital stories for and by Toowoomba residents. An outcome of a social living lab designed to facilitate digital participation in this regional city, the idea for Storyelling was developed and implemented by a community of emerging writers, artists and performers.
A motivation shared amongst this community was to ‘hear some of the stories from the Toowoomba region, but also inspire people to tell their own and other stories’. In imagining their web-based project, members were also imagining how they could create something that would be a connecting point for other people living in Toowoomba and possibly beyond: ‘We think there are some pretty amazing people in Toowoomba and storyelling is our way of connecting them to the broader community’.
The Fostering Digital Participation Project contributed to the conception and development of Storyelling by facilitating Living Lab experiences that helped the digital storytellers to devise their own editorial workflows and publishing strategies. Living Labs with local journalists experienced in digital storytelling enhanced understanding and fueled enthusiasm. These experiences developed the storytellers’ digital literacy by introducing them to essential editing software within an informal and peer-driven learning environment. The storytellers’ introduction to production techniques was augmented by additional experiences that allowed them to further develop their skills by publishing the digital stories on the free and open WIX platform.
Launched in July 2015, Storyelling continues to publish new digital stories overseen by an independent editorial team that includes members of the original group of writers, artists and performers. The Storyelling community has taken ownership of this digital initiative and looks forward to contributing to the culture and identity of Toowoomba by providing an opportunity for young storytellers to produce and publish digital stories.
Storyelling website: http://toowoombaconnect.wix.com/storyelling
Storyelling on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/storyelling/
We decided we wanted to make a website to bring Toowoomba together and we decided the best way to do that was collecting and sharing stories about ordinary people in the community.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
