Memory and memorials

Yesterday on the radio I talked about how Christchurch's galleries and museums have come through the Canterbury earthquake. Although it's a terrific shame about the damage to the Logie collection at the University of Canterbury, I was greatly relieved to hear how safely the buildings and collections of the Canterbury Museum and Christchurch Art Gallery came through the initial quake and the aftershocks: both have now reopened. It's a true testament to the foresight and skills of their staff.

As I noted in my piece, the Gallery in particular did a fantastic job of keeping its friends and fans up to date via its blog and twitter, and giving us peeks into the surreal sights of a gallery being used as a civil defence headquarters.




As I also noted on the radio, I really hope to see a community archive built around the photos, tweets, blog posts, news items and everything else that's been produced and sent out of Christchurch since last Saturday. There are all sorts of logistics around this, and Twitter is one of the most complicated, both in terms of copyright and the ephemeral nature of a tweet (they start disappearing off the web after about 20 days). While Twitter is lodging their archives with the Library of Congress, that's not going to help us much over here.










It's old school, but I've always dealt with this in the past by taking screenshots. A more sophisticated push to deal with all this stuff might involve using something like the kete software, and combing Flickr and blogs and asking photographers and writers for their permissions to upload copies of their content (a great opportunity to do some Creative Commons promotion and education at the same time). And I really hope that the National Library, which has the mandate to make copies of New Zealand digital content, has been out there collecting madly since last Saturday.

This morning I saw that The Press and stuff.co.nz are 'crowdsourcing' people's earthquake memories. This is a great initiative, but inevitably it comes with the 'all your copyrights are belong to us" terms and conditions:

You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide licence to republish any material you submit to us, without limitation, in any format.

We retain the right and discretion to terminate your access to the comments areas if we believe you are abusing the services in any way, or have breached these terms and conditions.

You consent to our collecting and storing your email and IP address for security purposes.

Sigh. There's got to be a better way.

Engage your community conference, Christchurch

Engage Your Community
Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology
16 April 2010
Registration between $40 and $85

Last year I attended and gave a workshop at the Wellington version of this event. It was awesome.

The Christchurch version looks equally interesting and useful (not to mention cheap as chips). The programme is structured as a series of short workshops, bookended with a presentation and a panel discussion. It looks like a good chance to survey a range of free or cheap web-based services that could help you with internal and external comms, from how to save money on long-distance calls by using Skype, to how to make beautiful word images using Wordle, to how to run a fund-raising campaign on Facebook.

In a little shout-out to my peeps, I'd highly recommend the sessions being run by Christchurch City Libraries staff, and Emma McCleary's Facebook workshop.

The bash is back

Artbash seems, after a few months of summertime languishing, to have sprung back to life. Well, 'sprung' might not be the right word, but some of the regular contributors, including John Hurrell and 'Jean' (Emily Cormack) are posting again.

Artbash describes itself as:

... an online community of New Zealanders who love art and love to talk about art. Sometimes things get a bit scrappy, but generally there are a bunch of intelligent and educated (well, we've been to art-school anyway) people to interact with.

Run out of Christchurch, it can be a bit Christchurch-centric, although Hurrell does his best to broaden the discussion. On the other (even) hand, it can be interesting to follow a community that's largely talking to and about itself - for example, the Christchurch Art Gallery review, restructure and re-staffing.

So - welcome back Artbash. Looking forward to seeing some sparks fly: Prospect 2007 would be a good launch pad.