Let There Be Photo
Why is the guy from the Greenpeace Photo Library posting on a blog about Greenpeace’s new Content Management System? I’m revealing my simple, and heartfelt conviction that to achieve success Planet 4 will need images. Excellent, startling, mind-blowing, world-rocking, pin-sharp and high-resolution, pictures. Photo, Video, Graphics, 360 VR….. I want us to share not just what’s available for P4, and all our other systems, but also to hear what we are missing.
All voices are welcome, all voices are needed to make sure we are shaping and sharing our visual future with a common purpose and connecting these systems in beneficial ways. We need an inclusive conversation to make sure we are sourcing the right kinds of material, in the right ways, from the right people and places and with licensing agreements appropriate to the relevant communications strategy, or theory of change. In that respect it’s equally vital to make sure we are sharing our media assets as effectively and efficiently as possible, whether it’s by technical, legal or cultural innovation. We need to maintain clarity and focus on our primary functions, but we need to fulfil those functions with a mission to encourage diversity in how we do it, and to enable partners and allies to further their own missions or agendas wherever we can.
Media.greenpeace.org’s primary function is to publish a constant stream of our latest images, and it’s that collected stream of imagery that forms and informs what we were, are, and will become. With that in mind please forgive the sharing of some history as context, it’s implicit to the act of curation.
We went online in 2007 with around 30,000 jpegs, selected from a (mostly 35mm celluloid) collection of around 500,000 frames. Greenpeace was, at that time, living on Planet 2 and the long term vision was to create a global picture library defined not just by it’s content, but by its users. The project was called HOPE, Hundreds Of Pictures Everywhere. It still survives in the form of media.greenpeace.org.
A decade later, much has changed; in the world around us, in Greenpeace, and not least in the Media Library and in the media landscape it inhabits. We now handle almost any media file type, including multimedia, video and Virtual Reality, and we have almost 250,000 images instantly available, being uploaded constantly from 18 Greenpeace Picture desks around the world. Greenpeace now publishes more pictures in an average week than we did in the whole of 1971 (our first year) alone and we’ve moved from a position where almost 85% of the content was commissioned by Greenpeace International, to the point now where almost none of it is. The media library keeps growing and evolving.
I use the term evolving advisedly. media.greenpeace.org. inhabits and shares a digital ecosystem, it needs to find a balance with the other organisms around it, both locally and globally. An ecosystem is not a hierarchy. There may be a tree or a taxonomy used to describe or map relationships, but the golden rule of evolution is simply that needs will be met, and niches will be filled, not that rules will be obeyed.
Both P4 and the Library are essential to our online presence. They need to interface with our other engagement platforms, like Greenpeace X, Greenwire, or our internal communications platform, Greennet, to a common purpose, rather than replicate each other’s function. We need them to work together for us to be successful. To make the very most of all of our resources, whether they be abundant or scarce. We also can’t ignore the wider landscape. We need to identify and consider the platforms we interface with in the outside world, in civil society, popular culture or social/professional media.
This new culture of open collaboration, this new fangled theory of evolution, is the very reason I’m writing here and not in an email to half a dozen people with Head, Manager or Director in their job titles.
I’d much rather ask YOU directly what you need the Media Library to do to make this digital ecosystem flourish, to make these relationships symbiotic, and deliver success for Greenpeace and the values we believe the world needs.
How do you envision the Media Library and the new Planet 4 system playing together? How can we work together to define the boundaries of the relationship between these complex systems?
You will have important contributions to make. I’m looking forward to seeing what the Visuals Community has to contribute to the discussion. We have an excellent and well established Library and development team who will be sharing ideas and innovations, relevant to P4 and to the wider project. We have Photo Editors, Videographers and Multimedia Producers in our Communications Hubs and Picture Desks, whose voices are yet to be heard. We also have over 7,000 press officers, journalists, photographers, bloggers, activists and supporters registered with us. All can contribute to technical, practical and we hope, inspirational, ideas for what we can do together, but if I have one big plea to our entire Greenpeace community it is this: Please don’t just watch this space. Write in it…
