Hi, my name is Delvin varghese and I'm a research fellow
at action lab, a group that conducts real world research with communities,
NGOs and government bodies, and it's based at Monash university.
Today I'll be talking about participator
video, also known as PV.
PV is an established practice for the nonprofits in the
international development space.
They use it to get the community feedback on development projects through
the use of community created content.
Back in 1967 Low and Snowden pioneered the Fogo process, in
which they put filmmaking equipment directly in the hands of children.
and these children then capture the challenges of
living on Fogo Island in the province of Newfoundland, Canada.
Since then, a number of organizations and NGOs in particular have been
seeing the potential of using PV to enable communities they
work with to tell their stories.
This enables NGOs to hear directly from the participants that they work with
in the words of an NGO member that we collaborated with as the donor or
person sitting back here in HQ that's what you want, real life happening
and not just the original report.
So we see that PV is used by these NGS to understand the impact of the programs.
On communities and especially when they're trying to work with them.
Longterm feedback given directly by communities is often seen as
being more credible and more real for donors and other stakeholders
within the organization.
In this study, we argue that current PV practice is very much rooted in the
digital media landscape that existed in 1980s this is after all, when PB first
started gaining mainstream attention.
The modern digital media landscape is unrecognizable from that time.
According to global web index, 92% of internet users today watch videos
online each month, and that's roughly 4 billion people in early 2019
Web 2.0 has seen the proliferation of social media and
the shift from media being broadcast by a few experts to user generated,
distribution and consumption of content, and yet the practices of supporting PV
have essentially remained and changed.
Current PV practice is still concerned with bringing camcorders
in your rural communities to help them tell their stories on film.
However, this approach has a few problems.
Smartphones are no longer a rare phenomena, and as such.
Many populations have existing technologies and have built
a media literacy that can be leveraged without bringing in
specialist equipment from outside.
And the traditional way of doing PV is too expensive for many NGOs
to utilize in their projects.
And that's why PV is being left out of many NGO practices
due to as in accessibility.
This study is our vision of what PV could look like.
When brought into conversation with modern technologies, trends,
and practices in digital media.
Now, researchers have discussed the challenges associated
with using PV before, and they talked about the problems associated
with using PV as a medium to engage participants in manual Itals work.
PV was used to facilitate the capture of citizen stories too.
It's a local neighborhood planning process.
They found that participants used PV to shed light on previously
hidden narratives, which highlighted elements they usually get lost behind
when participatory processes have rushed towards a predefined output.
And in our own prior work, we discussed the use of PV approaches that could use
advancements in mobile technologies, and we noted that barriers to entry for video
work could be significantly reduced.
So building on that in this study.
We examine the constraints faced by NGOs who use PV, and we offer some insights
on how PV can be reinvigorated to better support NGO and community needs.
Over the last few years, we collaborated with the international
Federation of red cross and red Crescent societies, better known as the IFRC
to conduct monitoring and evaluation.
This is where NGOs check on the progress of their projects in the
field known as M&E, using PV to engage rural communities in the feedback process.
IFRC at the world's largest development association, and they have members based
in over 190 countries around the world.
They are key actors in both short term and longer term development interventions.
We spoke with their staff from this movement who are based around the world in
different regions, and they do community feedback and engagement activities.
So we conducted interviews with 16 experienced practitioners, and the aim of
these interviews was to understand their perceptions and experiences of the use of
PV in humanitarian and development work.
Semi structured interviews were conducted and recorded via zoom.
Our participants suggested a number of challenges
with the community feedback process that could be better supportive
with modern media practice.
For example, many participants identified opportunities for ongoing and continuous
use of video within their roles.
Hiring external consultants for doing PV is a very
expensive process and we found that it was beyond the budget of many local chapters.
Some said they'd cost as much as a hundred thousand us dollars
for some types of projects.
and surprisingly, many organizations were not able
to justify the costly approaches that were involved in doing PV.
Another consideration is that the communities expect to be partners
in the decision making process of development, and they want to be more
involved and consulted rather than just being seen as passive recipients.
We can argue with them that existing PV approaches that
are being carried out by external consultants coming in for a short
period and producing community video is carried out against
the spirit of development ideas.
So now that we have taken a look at some characteristics of PV in the field, we're
going to look at a modern media practices.
We have picked object based media or OBM as a lens to critique PV practice
because it has certain properties that we believe are useful in this conversation.
First, it helps remove some workflow assumptions.
OBM removes many of the assumptions of traditional linear production workflows.
Which rely on the uni directional transfer of video content
from one process to the next.
Also, object based media considers all content to be equal through
the application of rich metadata.
Content is shaped and distributed rather than through destructive
processes of cutting and chopping
it's also reconfigurable individual elements of video can
be repackaged in myriad forms.
Based on any number of factors.
For example, personal preference, contextual relevance, or the language is
required by the viewer or the listener.
So we present PV 2.0 a new vision of PV based on these practices.
Reflecting on the current challenges mentioned in the findings above.
The traditional PV pipeline assumes roles such as presenters,
producers, editors, and consumers.
Yet there could be tremendous value if these distinctions are removed
when working with communities.
This is particularly true in the context of reflective or longitudinal use of PV.
What if facilitators put more focus on increasing media literacy of
the communities they work with.
This would enable the community to regularly input and be a valuable resource
in generating content for the NGO.
And this makes longterm community video work feasible for NGOs who
currently are not able to do so through expensive short term projects.
Redefining the PV process in terms of reconfigurable objects, forces
further reflection on the role of the editorial and post production processes
that are normally associated with PV.
That's opening new opportunities
in PV 2.0 the reliance on a linear production
pipeline is replaced with the flexible interpretation of narrative consumption.
This allows communities to produce content that can be consumed
by multiple stakeholders, for example, through an interactive
documentary format, whilst maintaining editorial and
narrative control over the content.
However, mechanisms for facilitating the new types of narrative
of such formats do not exist yet.
So that's processes will need to support core production and a
continual feedback loops between facilitators, community, and audience.
By the same time will allow for rich dialogue between
the community and external audiences.
Present day, commissioners of PV recognized the
rich value of video as data and expect to utilize these videos in ways never
envisioned by original pioneers of PV.
As our findings demonstrate the resource intensive nature of
PV production methods forces organizations into using the output.
For many purposes and audiences, for example, with their donors, headquarter
staff or government agencies, PV 2.0 configures the
production process to ask different questions of the community in order to
create video data that is more suitable for use as part of data triangulation.
In this study, we have seen that PV 2.0 can
configure the video production process to ask different questions
of the community of video creation.
This would allow organizations and communities to work together to
produce content that the communities can be in control of, and it's
more useful to the organization.
To conclude, PV needs to adapt to unleash its potential
for enabling communities to be more active agents in the development space.
Thank you.