Apr 20, 2017
The Big Bang of Collective Action: This Special Issue
This is part of “The Big Bang of Collective Action”, a nonlinear list essay by me, Jason Wyman, Impact Producer for The Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. It captures in its simple complexity the breadth of The Alliance’s Youth Media Collective Action Initiative.
Each “bullet” in the list contains both a visual code and a story. Some stories are metaphor. Some are poetry. Others are summaries. And even one is a worksheet. It is my humble attempt to synthesize the collective and manifest its wisdom in the form that works best for that collective wisdom.
“The Big Bang of Collective Action” is meant to be read in whatever manner moves you. At the end of this post is a visual table of contents. Click whichever CODE catches your eye or makes you want to click.
And please know, “ The Big Bang of Collective Action” is also a tool. It is meant to be used. So please interact with it by clicking links, leaving a comment, sharing it with a friend, sketching an idea, recording a video response, and/ or writing your own post.
For this Special Issue of Youth Media Reporter, we began with a six-month long conversation between the Youth Media Reporter Team (Jenna Azar, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, and Lora Taub-Pervizpour) and The Alliance’s Youth Media Collective Action Impact Producers (Myah Overstreet and Jason Wyman).
During this conversation we:
- shared our desired futures for each of our bodies of work,
- distilled the “what” of the collaboration and publication, and
- used consensus-building to identify roles, actions, and deadlines for publication.
We did this all using:
- email communications,
- Google Drive (documents, spreadsheets, and folders), and
- Zoom hosted video conference calls.
Through this initial conversation, we:
- discovered and refined a broad, central question to frame the line of inquiry,
- created a submission process that enabled contributors to maximize their creativity in submitting ideas beyond simple “articles” or “ blog posts”,
- formed a team of peer reviewers to support contributors in finding a voice / perspective / contribution that goes beyond their singular position,
- developed a file organization system to make collaboration easier.
This simple process created a mechanism for collaborative creation that is adaptive, generative, distributive, and iterative, and which ultimately resulted in This Special Issue of Youth Media Reporter featuring a diverse range of voices, geographies, bodies, expressions, practices, and affiliations.
