Look at this: an idea whose time has come, to my mind. There’s a graphic depiction of how it will work here.

It’s been a long time since I stumbled across some cool new web project that spoke to a niggling question raised by my research – and there are always a lot of niggling questions. In this case: why don’t digital storytellers, as well as amateur music producers, photographers, film-makers, animators, etc. have a networked space of their own? Why is the production and consumption of digital stories, for example, so static and limited? (eg someone attends a workshop, makes a story, the story gets uploaded to the “community media” project or the BBC’s website, attributed to a name without any kind of cultural presence on the web, and then that’s it – people can view it and sometimes comment, but there is little that the individual producer can leverage beyond saying “look. I made this story”).

So with this new project, it is not only the idea of a “repository” of multiple genres of independent and amateur broadband content, where users and upload and download, and remake content at will, subject to Creative Commons licensing that sparks my interest. This is obviously a damn good experiment.

But much more interesting to me are the hints of an intention to build communities of practice in and around the content – this has been the splinter in my brain keeping me up at night lately.

There are a lot of things I’m curious about, eg. how “repurposed” proprietary content (fan films, mashups, etc) will be handled, etc. But at least in theory, the idea of open media is a nice little birthday present for creativity/machine, which is one year old tomorrow.