The starting point for the StoryBank project was a sense that the technology-poor Budikote villagers had valuable stories and information to share, which might be extended with new technology. In particular, the way they currently told stories with pictures and music might be used to enliven radio content, or could be captured and shared in new ways so that they could fully participate in and benefit from content creation and sharing activities. This observation led the researchers to examine the way community radio programmes are made and enjoyed, and to identify some real benefits that might be achieved with digital technology. Skipping the text-based internet paradigm altogether, the project explored how camera phones and a library of digital stories (the "story bank") can be used to extend existing initiatives in community radio. These included widening participation through making stories on a mobile phone, using photographs as illustrations, and providing "listen again" facilities in a convenient location.

The cameraphones and digital library software were used to support the capture and sharing of information in the form of a short audiovisual story - one that can give voice to people who cannot read and write or use the internet to record and access textual information. The information gathered was made available in translated form to the United Kingdom (UK)-based team of engineers and designers, whose aim was to understand the needs of people from a different culture and to re-conceptualise internet content at a local level - making it more television (TV) than personal computer (PC)-centric, and testing its value across local and global divides.

The system researchers built has its heart a large touch-screen display in the village's community resource centre. This is a place where self-help groups gather, school children hang out, and other villagers pass through for information or to bump into their friends. Then, there are the mobile phones, Nokia N80s, donated by Nokia, a partner in the project. Villagers make short stories of up to six images and a two-minute audio track on the phones. They can then go to the community centre and donate their content to the StoryBank. Alternatively, they might share their story with others – the phone has a special-purpose media player and stories can be transferred to other phones over Bluetooth. All of the stories are available for browsing on the StoryBank screen: groups can watch them together and they can be downloaded to the phones for later viewing. No text is used in any of the user interfaces and traditional menus with their options, sub-options, and sub-sub-options have been replaced by more direct forms of interaction.

The StoryBank display uses a dynamic visual collage to display the stories. Media squares, each containing a villager's story, continuously emerge, float, and shrink within the display. Tapping on any of the squares brings up the story in full screen mode. Quicker access to particular types of content is possible too; pressing icons filters the collage so that only stories of the selected types, say health or education, bubble to the surface.

After refining the design and operation of the system with the locals, the researchers worked with two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the village to put it to the test. MYRADA, who run the resource centre, recruited 3 community representatives to give out the phones, while VOICES, which set up the community radio station, trained the representatives in using the phones and display. Ten phones were deployed for about 5 weeks at the end of last year and could be used to record audio-photo stories about anything the villagers thought other people might like to know about. These stories were regularly transferred to the touch-screen display, where a collection of digitised radio broadcasts were also stored. As the number of stories grew, regular visitors to the resource centre were invited to view them on the shared display, and individual visitors increased as news of particular stories spread by word of mouth.

During the trial period, hundreds of villagers took part both in creating stories and viewing them on the StoryBank. People of all ages, castes, and occupations were involved. "This wide participation of people in the trial reflected the usability of our phone and display interfaces, and shows that it is possible to create and share digital content without any textual input and output, or prior knowledge of multimedia editing tools and computers."

To understand what villagers were using the StoryBank system for, researchers looked at the process and content of story creation, and asked them which stories they found useful and why. Although the researchers wanted the phones to be loaned to individual authors for short periods of time, they discovered a reticence by community representatives to give them out overnight. So story creation was usually done in their presence, and was initially stimulated by a community meeting where over 250 story ideas were deliberately brainstormed across a range of topic categories. "...[T]his behaviour dramatically demonstrates the community nature of technology use in this context, and immediately highlights the need for better ways of tracking and sharing mobile phones originally designed for personal use. It also shows that the creation of StoryBank stories was approached by the community in the same way as the creation of community radio programmes - planned by a committee for practical community benefit."

Only about a fifth of planned stories were actually made. Often the planned stories were of serious development content such as how to grow rice, local crops, sheep rearing or the medicinal uses of plants, while the unplanned stories were more frivolous in nature. In Budikote village, the provision of an ICT system like StoryBank for sharing information about a health issue or crop problem is perceived as a serious working tool for health professionals, farmers and other workers, and of genuine potential value for village development. At the same time, the system also allows new forms of personal expression for the wider community, through combinations of pictures and sounds. It is used here as a community resource for work-related as well as personal information, and mediated by a device which is accessible free of charge to almost everybody in a spoken language community: the text-free Bluetooth camera phone.

Technology.

According to StoryBank organisers, Africa accounts for just 3.5% of the total users of the web; North America, with a third of the population, accounts for 18%. Ethiopia, with a population around that of the UK, has just 10,000 users.

Budikote is a small community of some 3,000 people, supported by agriculture. Most people in the village have low levels of literacy and their exposure to computers is very limited. However, at the start of 2007 one of the mobile phone operators in India installed a base-station, and within 9 months around 90% of the households had access to a mobile phone. While village textual literacy rates are low, visual and oral expression thrive. There's a long tradition of storytelling in the region, and during one of the fieldtrips researchers witnessed a method of communal storytelling that demonstrated a mixture of audio and visual expression: the storyteller slowly unfurled a scroll to reveal images to complement his patter. Throughout the tale, a band played accompanying music in the background. This kind of creativity is also used in the production of a daily community radio broadcast called Namma Dhwani or 'our voices': a village committee decides what kind of programmes to make and volunteers from the village, mainly women, undertake to research and record news items on health, education, farming, and other topics that are broadcast alongside devotional music and public service announcements.

The Storybank software is being adapted in projects such as Valleys Kids' Rhondda Lives! project, which provides opportunities for people of the Rhondda community (in Wales) to share digital stories about their lives and personal experiences, hardships they've worked through, and the history of their communities.