Voices without borders
Posted by Stephen Cho, Director,
Product Management
Our lives are a fabric of overlapping stories: stories that are
entirely unique, stories that are richly specific, stories that
define who we are, where we have come from, what we believe in. And
while each story is ultimately personal, we find across them the
common themes of love and loss, adversity and triumph. Listening to
others’ stories, we can better appreciate our shared humanity, and
recognize that the stories and lives of everyone, everywhere
matter.
In the U.S., the
capture, preserve, and share the stories of ordinary people. These
can be heard on Friday mornings on
National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.” Earlier this year, a
number of interested Googlers met with Dave Isay, founder of
StoryCorps, and also with leaders of One Laptop per Child (OLPC)
and UNICEF. We realized that collectively, we had a unique and very
real opportunity to leverage our respective strengths to take this
idea global and to build together an ability to preserve and share
online millions of personal stories from around the world.
With the good efforts of many people from each of the partners, we
brought this inspiration to fruition over the last six months, and
are excited to launch the Our Stories project and the
today. From the Google side, this grows out of our passion and
commitment to make the experience and wisdom of these personal
stories universally accessible to users around the world.
One Laptop per Child (
effort to help bring laptops to children in developing countries
around the globe. (Google is a founding supporter of OLPC.) The
distribution of OLPC laptops provides us with a platform to help
preserve and extend the histories and identities of these
traditional cultures. Children receive training on the Our Stories
activity on the laptops, and record in their native languages the
stories of their elders, their family members, and friends. These
stories are then uploaded and shared through the website, where
they can be found on a Google Map.
For this project, UNICEF’s in-country communications teams are
working with the schools using OLPC laptops, and also with children
using other recording devices, computers, and mobile phones to
preserve and share stories online. An enthusiastic team of Google
volunteers, including me, developed the laptop application, the
interview guides based on the work of StoryCorps, and the
website.
In the coming years, we hope to capture and share millions of
stories, which we believe will help to preserve a truly global,
multi-lingual history of humanity in the 21st century.
We also hope that, in some small measure, the ability to listen to
the voices of others, to hear first hand about their hopes and
challenges, contributes to a better understanding of our shared
humanity across the many lines which often divide us.
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