Culture Storage

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Posted in Proposals 2006

Author: Kristy Lyn Levings

What NEED does this meet?

With the rapid change in climate and geopolitical strife possible in our lifetimes, we will see mass migrations of peoples. History has shown us that the movement of peoples has inevitably damaged or destroyed the social fabric that creates unique, diverse, and necessary cultural wisdom.

What is the APPROACH?

I would like to suggest a Cultural Wikipedia. We are in a technologically advantageous place in time where we have the capabilities to record and store things visually, auditorially, and in writing. I’m advocating that we create an uploadable website which people globally can add pictures, songs, writings, and more benchmarking cultures and civilizations before they disintigrate, or disappear entirely.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

Having a website dedicated solely to cultures would be priceless. And lets not forget about the advantages of having generational oral wisdom accessible to all people. Or to those who want to know the details of their ancestry.

What is the COMPETITION?

Obviously, there’s already Wiki- but its not dedicated to any one thing, and ours would be solely for the storage of cultural information.

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

It’s just a website.

5 Comments

  1. The British library has recently announced their intention to create a research bank of web pages.

    Why not use Wikipedia as the repository/portal in the meantime?

  2. Kristy Lyn Levings

    Ed,
    Thanks for your response. I love the all-encompassing nature of Wiki, but the reason I was suggesting a separate website is precisely because of its size and lack of foci.
    Rather, what I’m envisioning is something entirely devoted to culture. Devoted to uploading video of that special rain dance, or recordings of language, or pictures of dress. But a site specifically for culture. I anticipate with the changing weather due to climate crisis, there will be mass migrations of people. And history has shown that with the movement of people, cultures have proven to disintegrate. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a forum, such as a website, dedicated to helping preserve unique cultures?

  3. hi Kristy (and other readers) –

    I’ve been working on a project called cultureset.

    It’s been a part-time, one-person project for me, and very fun to obsess over and create an entire website application. But now I’m taking a step back and looking at how to connect with other people that are interested in such projects. That’s how I got to mysociety.org.

    In short, culturset.com helps users recreate their own past (or, to pinpoint the time that things happened in their lives), by relating them to “events” that other people have submitted. Users can work individually, or they can send event lists to each other offline, or they can share event lists in real-time.

    Users who “publish” event lists can embed URLs in the events, in order to drive traffic back to their own sites. This is one of the ways in which I hope to develop more usership. It also introduces more users to the concept of common-format data publishing – every user publishes data in a common XML format, which then can point back to their non-common HTML-formatted data.

    I’ve also recently added support for importing iCalendar files, and reading data based in HEML (Historical Event Markup Language).

    I have done some commercially-oriented things, such as filing a provisional application for a patent, and building out some architecture for paid memberships (a membership would increase the amount of data a user can work with).

    But I’ve never really been fully driven to make this a company-based project. It’s been more of a basic desire to build out the concept, and have it available on the web for the next time I need to do a job interview! If I can make some money from memberships, that’s cool too.

    Kristy, I imagine that this is not exactly what you had proposed, but I thought I would show it to you anyway. Perhaps there are modifications that would move it closer to your idea?

    thanks for your time…

    dan stadler

    ps – I have no QA department (besides myself!) – so please forgive any bugs that you might run into.