Case Study: 18DaysInEgypt
18DaysInEgypt is a project inspired by the Egyptian revolution. Its current iteration allows individuals to upload their stories and create additional stories, gathering sources from the Web. The project speaks directly to the central theme of our discussion. We had an opportunity to interview interactive designer and co-creator, Yasmine Elayat, about the project.
INTERVIEW: Yasmine Elayat (co-creator)
How did the idea for 18 Days in Egypt come about?
During the first eighteen days of the Egyptian revolution, Egyptians were documenting one of the most important historical movements in their country's history through tweets, photos, and thousands and thousands of hours of video. Millions of Egyptians had access to some type of recording device, ranging from high-end DLSR cameras to cell phone cameras.
This is how the world experienced those first eighteen days, in real-time, from on the ground activists. The world was witness to the frontlines of history in the making. Somewhere in all that massive information-sharing there were very important stories about how these events actually played out in the streets of Egypt.
The idea of the website was conceived during the celebrations of February 11th. My co-creator, Jigar Mehta, a friend and video-journalist previously with the New York Times, was watching the celebrations in Egypt and it struck him how everyone was filming the celebrations using their phones and cameras – my own family included. The idea was: what was going to happen to all the media that Egyptians produced during those eighteen days? Why not collect this entire media to create a crowdsourced documentary film?
Jigar called me that day to congratulate me on Mubarak stepping down and to tell me the idea of creating a crowdsourced film. I instantly loved the idea – wouldn’t it be great to have everyone tell the story of the January 25 revolution? Everyone took pictures, video, or wrote SMS and updates to Twitter and Facebook. Why not collect them all to tell the collective history of our revolution?
I immediately was on board for the project. It appealed to me on two fronts – as an Egyptian who wants to document Egypt’s revolution for future generations in a world where much of this material exists online on social media. It also appealed to my interactive-storytelling and technical background – the work I was doing up to that time was in an interdisciplinary field combining art, storytelling and technology.
Our first iteration of the project launched one week later, where the description of the project was:
Our goal is to create a visually stunning and engaging experience of Egypt’s ongoing revolution, but we also have a larger goal of getting closer to the heart of what happened. We all know the major news headlines, but we’re more interested in finding and showcasing the smaller threads and more personal experiences that reveal the truth of what’s happening on the ground. Using the micro to fill in the blanks and build the macro story with our own conclusions. History isn’t linear, and we are building a platform that challenges that very premise.
We are empowering the community to document the story the way it happened, using their own voice. The community is now controlling the story, documenting their own history, and sharing it directly with the world. It’s a very powerful idea. The entire world that is watching Egypt right now will be able to re-live these experiences through the eyes of the Egyptian community.
If we’re successful, imagine all the possibilities using this platform.
As an Egyptian-American, how did you become involved in the project?
I was previously living in New York and was not in Egypt during the first eighteen days of the revolution. I experienced the events through my family and friends who were there; it was a very difficult experience not to be there during those first eighteen days. When Jigar approached me, I felt the project was very exciting and ambitious and needed the right type of skill-set and team to make it a reality. Jigar’s film and visual storytelling background coupled with my interdisciplinary background in technology, interactive storytelling and interaction design was perfectly suited for this project. Also, as an Egyptian I felt it was very critical and important work. The media was going to be lost over time and memories will fade. The Egyptian Diaspora needs to be involved as well as the national Egyptian community in the documentation of Egypt’s history for future generations – in whatever form the project eventually was going to take.
After Jigar and I teamed up, I realized that this was project was my passion and a real full-time endeavor. I quit my job as a software developer and interaction designer in New York and moved back to Cairo to start building our team in Egypt and to start building networks for us to partner up with.
I used to live in Egypt, and have been meaning to move back, so what better time to move back then when the country was in transition. This was the most opportune time to move back to Egypt when one can contribute to the development of the country in whatever shape and form. The move back was an obvious decision for me.
What is your role in the project?
I’m the co-creator and the chief architect of the project. What that means is I basically come up with ideas and concepts and design solutions for the project – what could a collaborative storytelling platform look like? How can you and/or a group of people contribute to one story? How do you experience a story from multiple perspectives? How do you learn more about the person behind the story? How do you view and browse stories based on location or by timeline? How can you weave narratives together and still maintain the author’s voice?
These are the types of questions that really excite me and I approach them by designing wireframes, mockups and early prototypes to test these ideas. What is great about building a technical platform is the flexibility inherent in technology. My technical background highly informs many decisions I make because I know what is technically possible – we can dream and then actually build it, and it’s not working, then we can easily iterate on the idea again until it works.
My background in interactive storytelling and design in the interactive museum exhibit space trained me in how to rethink the use of technology as more of a medium, a means to an end, to create more engaging, immersive and visual experiences for people.
I’ve always been an equally right-brain/left-brain person. I naturally pursued both arts and technology, not really expecting to find a career that can merge both of my interests. In my mind, technology was going to be my career, and art was going to be something I did on the side.
But, while I was studying Computer Science at the America University in Cairo, I stumbled upon the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It seemed to be the perfect program made for people like me. ITP is an interdisciplinary program at an art school where technology is used as a means to an end, and not the end itself. At ITP you had artists, programmers, game designers, hackers, dancers, filmmakers and people from all sorts of different fields with a similar interest and approach to technology. ITP is an intellectual playground for the artists and techies inside all of us.
I believe that game designers, artists, filmmakers, writers and interaction/installation designers are all storytellers. Our approach to the craft of storytelling is very different, obviously, but in the end, storytelling is the main tool we all use in our work. We all have a point of view and a vision that we are trying to convey via our work.
I understand that you moved back to Egypt to work on this project. Can you describe the work that you are doing in Egypt?
When I moved back to Egypt end of April last year, my main goal was to find the right partnerships, secure funding for this project and to start building our team in Cairo. I had to be in Egypt for us to be able to build this project and actually make it a reality.
We partnered with Emerge-Technology over the summer, a five-year old Cairo-based tech company founded by a few of my old Computer Science classmates and friends. They were the ideal partners because of their experience with HTML5 and because they are visionary technologists. Mohammed El-Shinnawy, one of the founding partners of Emerge and our current Technical Lead, immediately saw the power of our idea and the platform we wanted to build. He and his team were instantly on board after I showed them our early mockups and prototypes. They became partners with us on this endeavor and we started building the platform together in July.
I also met with many potential partners and individuals who were to become important supporters for the project. Moukhtar Kocache of the Ford Foundation in Cairo really opened the door for me here in Cairo. Moukhtar introduced me to Mossireen, an independent media and citizen journalism collective here in Cairo. Mossireen is doing amazing on-the-ground work in documenting the on-going revolution. Mossireen invited 18DaysInEgypt to a few round-table discussions with all projects and people in Cairo working on important initiatives like the National Archive head by Khalid Fahmy and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, or the media-based Tahrir media-tent archive Thawra Media, Tahrir Radio an online political and self-expression radio station, Aotubees Al-Horeyya (the Freedom Bus) that set out to different governates over the summer, the Contemporary Image Collective Cairo that trains journalists and photographers in multimedia storytelling, photo-journalism, etc and also provides a free space and resources to the community – just to name a few of the amazing groups and initiatives that we brainstormed with and presented our work to. This was an opportunity not only to learn and partner with other initiatives but also to create a community of people who can help each other build and document Egypt’s ongoing revolution.
One of our main goals with 18DaysInEgypt was to also create an on-the-ground outreach program that we called the 18DaysInEgypt fellowship program. Egypt has low net-penetration; some estimate the number to be about 25% of Egypt is online. We want to make sure that 18DaysInEgypt is an inclusive project, not just about the 25%, or just Tahrir, but all of Egypt. Our goal with the fellowship program is to cover all of Egypt’s governates by hiring and training young students and journalists from different universities across the country who can then go out in their own communities to gather stories and document events from their governates.
We launched the fellowship program in January and already have six Cairo-based fellows working with us on the project including a community manager. We just raised $20,000 in funds via the crowd-funding platform KickStarter to now expand the fellowship across Egypt. The fellowship aims to provide equal opportunities for men and women. There is a lot of potential in the fellowship to develop it into its own education program. One hope for the fellowship is to institutionalize the training aspect by establishing a separate NGO, eventually. But currently, we are partnering with a local NGO with an existing network.
We are very excited about this program, our current test-run with six fellows has worked out
really well. These young men and women are very talented and enthusiastic and have done amazing work so far, that anyone can view on our live site – they’re the future of Egypt.
How has the project evolved with the recent political developments in Egypt?
For a long time we were limiting the project to just the first 18DaysInEgypt due to the sheer amount of data and media that exists out there, and also we were calling on the community to send us all their media, add tags and context to each individual piece of media. The smallest unit on the platform used to be one media fragment.
With all the ongoing events we were witnessing, we realized we had to open up the platform to include all the current events as well. We made sure we built our platform to be scalable and robust enough to handle that. That was the first major evolution in our project.
Can you describe how your project uses ‘crowd sourcing’?
The goal of 18DaysInEgypt is to tell the story of the ongoing Egyptian revolution through the point of view of Egyptians. We needed a collaborative storytelling platform to help us collect all these stories from the community and to continually tell the story of the revolution. The platform allows the community to upload, create and share their stories in an easy, visual way.
Anyone can easily register in one step using any existing social media account like Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or Google. Once registered, we guide users through the storytelling experience via a dialog. The dialog asks the user the following questions: When did your story take place, and they can enter the start date for their story, which we use as a data point and a tag. Then we ask the user to enter a title and description for the story they want to share. Next, we ask the users where did you story take place? Using a Google map, the user can enter a location or pin it on the map. Finally, we ask users who else was there with them during that event or who else can help tell the story. We allow the storyteller to invite any of their friends to help them contribute media and help tell the story. 18DaysInEgypt will then send a notification to their friends.
After they complete the dialog, users land on the collection tools where they can access any of their media via their connected social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so forth. A user can add any tweets or posts from their Facebook timeline from any specific day, they can also add their own personal Facebook photos or albums, they can also add their own media from YouTube or Flickr or include any public media from those sites, if they themselves don’t have media from that specific event. We also allow users to upload any photos or videos of their computers and we provide a text tool for any type of written testimony.
Using these tools, users can create and curate many stories individually or with a group of people. It’s very easy to create a story and once they click "Publish," we create a visual, unified stream of their story to view on the site and share on any of the social media networks. This is our first iteration of collaborative storytelling platform and very soon we’re adding more features to make the storytelling process more engaging and more visually appealing.
The very nature of the platform is crowd-sourcing the story of Egypt’s history. Anyone can participate and anyone can create a story. We provide the platform they provide their content and point of view. We have many future plans on how the larger community can also participate, navigate and weave through this growing collection of crowd-sourced perspectives.
We plan to build a completely web-native, interactive documentary, where you can experience and weave stories and perspectives from the community in a seamless way. It will be a destination site now and in the future to experience Egypt’s ongoing history written by the people.
Is there a digital divide in Egypt? And, if so, how would you describe it? How do Egyptians use mobile media? How are you communicating about your project to citizens from all classes and backgrounds?
Yes, there is a digital divide in Egypt as I mentioned previously with regards to low net penetration. Also, the larger Egyptian community does not have a computer or laptop at home. We are very aware of this divide and are trying to tackle it with our on-the-ground outreach effort and by training students from all across Egypt to participate in the project via their own local communities.
Mobile penetration is obviously much higher in emerging markets like Egypt, however for technical reasons (we could not find easy Egypt-based solutions for SMS collection) and fiscal reasons (the cost of a MMS message or email is too high for us to ask mobile users to participate that way), we were unable to engage the community that way.
The biggest challenge for Egypt’s developing media landscape is reaching that larger audience. Citizen journalists, activists and young political parties understand these obstacles, and I know of political and cultural initiatives trying to engage the rest of Egypt. The more dialogue that there is with the outer governates of Egypt, the working neighborhoods within Cairo, and those that are part of the connected-informed, the better the transition will be for Egypt.
We suffer that same problem with our project. And we hope that our fellowship program is one way to tackle it. We are flexible and adaptable and can shift our focus if the fellowship program proves to be not successful enough in reaching that wider audience. It’s a problem that we will continue to face and we’ll be trying to find a workable solution.
Despite the current situation, I remain hopeful because I think this puts Egypt on the cutting edge of the next iteration of journalism, since citizen-journalism, collaborative journalism, and user-generated content is the next generation of journalism and storytelling. There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but Egyptians are a creative, tech-savvy people.
Can you describe some of the obstacles that the project has encountered?
Besides the issue of the digital divide in Egypt, the other main obstacle we are facing is communicating to the Egyptian community that this is their project as well. What I mean by that is many people come to the site to experience stories, but either don’t realize that they can also participate or they feel that they themselves don’t have important stories to share.
We need to better communicate that every story is important and what our goal and vision for this project is. We are relaunching our front page soon to more effectively communicate that.
This type of project and any new technology in Egypt will take a while before it takes off in the country. Early tech adoption is not common here and it will require an on-going engagement effort on our part. How can we make it an even less-barrier to entry? How do we reach more people? How do you convince the larger audience that their story is just as important? How do you teach a community to document their own history – something that has never been done before on this scale or effort?
How do you see mobile/new/emerging media being used (or not) in shaping the political future for Egypt?
Currently, there is a gap and/or delay between journalism and user-generated, citizen journalism. Yet journalism is evolving more and more to incorporate users and social media. In Egypt, there is an even more of a gap due to the complicated history and relationship between state media and the government. The reporting of Egypt’s Bloody Sunday (the Oct 9th Maspiro incident) is a sad example of how in conflict these two voices – the state-sponsored media versus the eye-witness accounts from the citizen-journalists – can be. The reason there is such a stark contrast in the reports has to do with what interests each voice is serving. The state media is serving the interests of the government, which means protecting the government’s interest, image and staying on message as the protectors of the people. The current transitional government is in a precarious position with a lot to lose and they are very entrenched in their ways – it’s an institution. The citizen-journalists that emerged out of the Arab Spring are interested in an open and free Egypt. They want democracy, they want change. They want transparency and want to expose the truth as they experience it. They want their voices heard.
Unfortunately, the state media has a wider outreach right now than the citizen journalists. That is due to the tools used by both parties. Egypt’s low net-penetration already limits the reach of citizen journalists who are usually using the Internet to broadcast their messages via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, and websites. State media uses TV and controls the large newspapers which ensures the widest outreach in Egypt.
However, there are cases where new media or social media did find that massive outreach and influenced Egypt’s political climate. The obvious example is the story of Khalid Said, the Alexandrian twenty-eight-year old who was publicly beaten to death by two policemen. Khalid Said’s story and coverage started on social media first via bloggers and Facebook exposing the atrocity and the brutality he suffered at the hands of the police and his story spread like wild fire. The disturbing after-photos of his broken and beaten face were posted and re-shared all over Facebook. The abuse itself was documented and the videos posted to the Internet. His story became a very important symbol to the Egyptian people and the revolution.
I believe some of the independent media initiatives are finding their way catapulted on to the national stage, where they will have that wider outreach, using very creative means. One example that comes to mind is the comedian Bassem Youseef who has been described as the Egyptian Jon Stewart. During the first 18 days, his YouTube comedy was extremely popular for his political and cultural satire. Then he got picked up by a media organization, with a fully produced TV show. He still puts every show on YouTube to pay tribute to his early followers and his roots. He still tackles political issues on his TV show, and he’s not shying away from commentary via humor.
Other projects like the Kazaboon (Liars) project that exposes the media and current government’s mis-information by projecting videos onto public walls and spaces to reach people in the street. Tahrir Cinema was another imitative over the summer, that essentially created an open-space cinema in Tahrir Square where they would show videos, films, citizen-journalism documentation projects on a screen for those in the square to view. Another great initiative, which is a self-expression project called Mahsrou3 al Mareekh is essentially a nationally traveling open-mic stage for anyone to sing, perform stand-up comedy or political theater, etc, which is giving a platform for Egyptians who found their voice in #Jan25 a stage to continue using their voice.
I am seeing and hope to see more of these types of initiatives finding creative ways to reach and engage larger audience and helping shape Egypt’s political future. It’s an exciting time, and Egyptians are innovative, I really am optimistic that via these outlets, platforms and national-touring projects, Egypt will find a way to build and shape its political future.
Can you describe the finished experience of this project? What will it look, interact, feel like?
The finished experience is something we are working on currently. We are working with partners like Mozilla and Tribeca Film Institute to play around in this space and come up with what we believe is the next generation of transmedia storytelling and a new form for hybrid documentary. We were fortunate enough to be believed in by two institutions that are the leaders in storytelling – The Sundance Institute and the Tribeca Film Institute. Last year, for the first time ever, both institutes launched programs for this new space of transmedia storytelling.
The Tribeca Film Institute launched its first-ever New Media Fund last year, and we were one of the grantees receiving a $100,000 grant to develop 18DaysInEgypt. Tribeca is working with us closely to advise us as we move forward with the experience aspect of the project. Last year, the Sundance Institute launched its first ever New Frontier Storylab, which like the Producer’s lab and the Director’s lab, invites artists for a one-week lab of mentorship and workshops to explore the art form of storytelling with respect to each project’s individual goals and vision. The New Frontier Storylab focuses on storytelling in the transmedia space, this new emerging form where our imagination really is the limit.
We were one of the six artist projects selected to participate in the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Storylab. It was an amazing experience to work with leaders in transmedia storytelling. Some of our Creative Advisors during that week long workshop were: Cara Mertes, Director of Sundance’s Documentary Film Program; director/filmmaker Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country); Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment; Aaron Koblin, head of Google’s Data Art team; game designer Nick Frotugna (Playmatics); David Gale of MTVX; Lance Weiler (Pandemic); documentary filmmaker Noland Walker (Citizen King); and, Takaaki Okada (Condition ONE). It was a valuable experience in rethinking our approach to the final experience of the project by incorporating everything from lessons learned from game theory to more traditional film narrative.
How would you describe the role of the participants in your project? What do describe as (or anticipate as) their relationship or emotional reaction to the project?
The participants are the driving force for the project. They will set the tone and the scale of the project. A project like 18DaysInEgypt will not be successful without mass participation. We are just providing an empty canvas for participants to use, as they would like. It’s the beauty of a project like this; we cannot anticipate what it will eventually be. It’s a continually organically evolving living story.
We hope that participants see that this is their project – their story. We want the community to understand our vision and like us understand that this media is already disappearing and fading from our collective memory if they do not partake and start documenting what is still available and while it’s still fresh in our collective memory. When users come and see some of the stories that our early users have created they find it emotionally engaging because what they’re seeing is a relatable human side of the story. It’s not the headlines you see in the news everyday. For example, after the Port Said Massacre one participant named Shadi Hamid created a story called My Heroes of the Revolution, which was her own account of the Ultras soccer fans and what they mean to her and what they symbolize in the ongoing Egyptian revolution. That was the story that peaked in viewership after the soccer match massacre, not the stories that were just covering the events. I believe that indicates a need and interest for this more engaging subjective, personal perspective of the events in Egypt.
Currently, participants understand on an emotional and archival level the importance of a project like this. We anticipate that as the site continues to build that more participants will feel the pull to engage with us further and start adding their own personal stories for their own children or the next generation. Can you imagine ten or twenty years from now, their children going to 18DaysInEgypt to view their mother’s stories from this historic time in Egypt? That’s the type of emotional pull a project like 18DaysInEgypt has.
Do you think this project will reflect the pulse of the Egyptian people at this particular time? If so, how? How will the project demonstrate this?
I hope so. Currently, we haven’t hit that critical mass that really reflects the pulse of the Egyptian people, but it is most certainly our goal. For 18DaysInEgypt to truly reflect the pulse of the Egyptian people, it needs an enormous diversity of voices. I would say that currently our users are the more activist-minded participants who are still going strong in the marches and the protests. We also have a few stories about the Hezb Al Kanaba (The Couch Party or the silent majority). I would love to see stories by participants who were with the early days of the revolution but now have lost steam or diverged from the revolutionaries. I want to see stories from the soldiers and the military too. It’s important that all points of view are represented on this platform – whether you are for or against.
We believe with our on-the-ground outreach efforts we can start to cultivate this broader spectrum of a community. Tahrir is one thing, but Bedouins in Sinai have their own unique point of view just as falaheen do in Upper Egypt. How did they feel during those first 18 days as opposed to now? Who is against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces and who wants to be patient and see how things play out this coming year? Why did certain people never go to Tahrir until the anniversary? Who participates in the Mansour clashes? Who are the martyrs of the revolution – what’s their story? How about the politicians? What motivates them? What do they see as their role in the years going forward?
When we can engage more participants and collect all of these different perspectives, then yes, our project will correctly reflect the pulse of the diverse Egyptian population. Our vision is for you to be able to see the same event from these different perspectives and their own reflections. We want to give the viewer an informed choice about the person behind the story and how they are different from another person who experienced this same event. Egyptians are not a homogenous group of people, everyone has a different story and a different opinion about Egypt’s ongoing events, and we want to make sure to be inclusive of all these perspectives.
How do you anticipate viewers/users to interact with the finished experience? What do you hope they’ll experience or gain from it?
We anticipate that users will come to 18DaysInEgypt to learn about the reality and personal stories of how things actually are playing out in Egypt. We want to give users the ability and the tools to curate the experience they are interested in. For example, we want users to be able to juxtapose opposing narratives of the same event from not only different perspectives from the same city, but from different socio-economic strata, different governates in Egypt, different backgrounds, and people who have different goals for Egypt, etc. We hope the user will be able to not only learn about the diversity of the Egyptian populace, but also learn that things in Egypt are layered and complex and different people are suffering from different problems. If a user can relate and learn from someone from an opposing viewpoint or background, or if a user can learn about a city they knew nothing about then this project will be a success.
We will build all this into the experience. A way to weave the narratives by giving the user the choice. We are collecting many data points and tags from each story in order to so.
What is the final purpose or objective of the project? Do you plan to multi-source the material? Will it exist solely on the web or do you plan do create a longer format project (similar to Life in a Day or The Green Wave)?
The objective of 18DaysInEgypt is to be the first living history project written by the people who are living through it and experiencing it first-hand. There is no need for a linear historical narrative and there is no room for just one authoritative historical account. Technology has made this type of historical documentation outdated.
Everyone is a storyteller. We all share posts, articles our thoughts and our beliefs already on a variety of social media services. We all have a point of view and an opinion and our own personal experiences. These stories already exist across different services, but they’re currently scattered and buried under the avalanche of the always-newer events. Our goal is to pull all these media fragments and help users make a meaningful story out of them.
We imagine 18DaysInEgypt to be the next generation of storytelling. We believe that the best stories out there are those that are told together. We all are experiencing these important events with others, so by telling these stories together with those who were there with you, you can tell a more complete, multi-faced story. We see the name 18DaysInEgypt as a larger metaphor for what Egyptians are capable of; Egyptians are changing the course of history for their country, after all, they did topple a dictator of 30 years in only 18 days. That’s amazing!
I’m excited about 18DaysInEgypt being used to document the upcoming presidential Egyptian elections, the transition of the new government, and all the new historical milestones coming up in 2012.
Due to nature of this project, we cannot predict or foresee the final form. We have plans to make it a web-native living documentary that is continually evolving, where these characters you are following are real people with real streams out there. We want you to engage in a dialog with the participants after you view their stories. What are they doing now? Have they changed their mind or hopes for Egypt? You can currently click on any media in a user’s story to see the original source of the content or you can directly go to their current twitter feed and engage with them their in real-life. You can only accomplish this type of inter-connected relationship and dialog on the web.
That’s not to say that there can’t be multiple outputs for this type of project. One output of 18DaysInEgypt might still become a more traditional feature-film, but in that case we as the project creators are telling a story – we have to draw a line in the sand and tell the story that we want to tell. It’s not the same form as a web-native, interactive documentary, but there is definitely a place for a more, long-form film told by the creators using the characters and stories we want to use from the building collection of stories. I can also see 18DaysInEgypt content powering many other forms of digital storytelling like an interactive museum installation or public art space. The sky really is the limit.
INTERVIEW: Yasmine Elayat (co-creator)
How did the idea for 18 Days in Egypt come about?
During the first eighteen days of the Egyptian revolution, Egyptians were documenting one of the most important historical movements in their country's history through tweets, photos, and thousands and thousands of hours of video. Millions of Egyptians had access to some type of recording device, ranging from high-end DLSR cameras to cell phone cameras.
This is how the world experienced those first eighteen days, in real-time, from on the ground activists. The world was witness to the frontlines of history in the making. Somewhere in all that massive information-sharing there were very important stories about how these events actually played out in the streets of Egypt.
The idea of the website was conceived during the celebrations of February 11th. My co-creator, Jigar Mehta, a friend and video-journalist previously with the New York Times, was watching the celebrations in Egypt and it struck him how everyone was filming the celebrations using their phones and cameras – my own family included. The idea was: what was going to happen to all the media that Egyptians produced during those eighteen days? Why not collect this entire media to create a crowdsourced documentary film?
Jigar called me that day to congratulate me on Mubarak stepping down and to tell me the idea of creating a crowdsourced film. I instantly loved the idea – wouldn’t it be great to have everyone tell the story of the January 25 revolution? Everyone took pictures, video, or wrote SMS and updates to Twitter and Facebook. Why not collect them all to tell the collective history of our revolution?
I immediately was on board for the project. It appealed to me on two fronts – as an Egyptian who wants to document Egypt’s revolution for future generations in a world where much of this material exists online on social media. It also appealed to my interactive-storytelling and technical background – the work I was doing up to that time was in an interdisciplinary field combining art, storytelling and technology.
Our first iteration of the project launched one week later, where the description of the project was:
18DaysInEgypt is a crowdsourced interactive documentary project of the events from #Jan25 to #Feb 11. Tag your media on Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr using the #18daysinegypt and we’ll find it and include it in our crowd-sourced feature film.The project has evolved a lot since then, and it has undergone a few more iterations until it settled in its current form. The project has expanded to include Egypt’s current events and ongoing revolution. It has also pivoted from a feature-film to a web-native interactive documentary where the source is the storyteller. We built a storytelling platform providing the tools for storytelling to the community, where they can share their media and their own story.
Our goal is to create a visually stunning and engaging experience of Egypt’s ongoing revolution, but we also have a larger goal of getting closer to the heart of what happened. We all know the major news headlines, but we’re more interested in finding and showcasing the smaller threads and more personal experiences that reveal the truth of what’s happening on the ground. Using the micro to fill in the blanks and build the macro story with our own conclusions. History isn’t linear, and we are building a platform that challenges that very premise.
We are empowering the community to document the story the way it happened, using their own voice. The community is now controlling the story, documenting their own history, and sharing it directly with the world. It’s a very powerful idea. The entire world that is watching Egypt right now will be able to re-live these experiences through the eyes of the Egyptian community.
If we’re successful, imagine all the possibilities using this platform.
As an Egyptian-American, how did you become involved in the project?
I was previously living in New York and was not in Egypt during the first eighteen days of the revolution. I experienced the events through my family and friends who were there; it was a very difficult experience not to be there during those first eighteen days. When Jigar approached me, I felt the project was very exciting and ambitious and needed the right type of skill-set and team to make it a reality. Jigar’s film and visual storytelling background coupled with my interdisciplinary background in technology, interactive storytelling and interaction design was perfectly suited for this project. Also, as an Egyptian I felt it was very critical and important work. The media was going to be lost over time and memories will fade. The Egyptian Diaspora needs to be involved as well as the national Egyptian community in the documentation of Egypt’s history for future generations – in whatever form the project eventually was going to take.
After Jigar and I teamed up, I realized that this was project was my passion and a real full-time endeavor. I quit my job as a software developer and interaction designer in New York and moved back to Cairo to start building our team in Egypt and to start building networks for us to partner up with.
I used to live in Egypt, and have been meaning to move back, so what better time to move back then when the country was in transition. This was the most opportune time to move back to Egypt when one can contribute to the development of the country in whatever shape and form. The move back was an obvious decision for me.
What is your role in the project?
I’m the co-creator and the chief architect of the project. What that means is I basically come up with ideas and concepts and design solutions for the project – what could a collaborative storytelling platform look like? How can you and/or a group of people contribute to one story? How do you experience a story from multiple perspectives? How do you learn more about the person behind the story? How do you view and browse stories based on location or by timeline? How can you weave narratives together and still maintain the author’s voice?
These are the types of questions that really excite me and I approach them by designing wireframes, mockups and early prototypes to test these ideas. What is great about building a technical platform is the flexibility inherent in technology. My technical background highly informs many decisions I make because I know what is technically possible – we can dream and then actually build it, and it’s not working, then we can easily iterate on the idea again until it works.
My background in interactive storytelling and design in the interactive museum exhibit space trained me in how to rethink the use of technology as more of a medium, a means to an end, to create more engaging, immersive and visual experiences for people.
I’ve always been an equally right-brain/left-brain person. I naturally pursued both arts and technology, not really expecting to find a career that can merge both of my interests. In my mind, technology was going to be my career, and art was going to be something I did on the side.
But, while I was studying Computer Science at the America University in Cairo, I stumbled upon the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It seemed to be the perfect program made for people like me. ITP is an interdisciplinary program at an art school where technology is used as a means to an end, and not the end itself. At ITP you had artists, programmers, game designers, hackers, dancers, filmmakers and people from all sorts of different fields with a similar interest and approach to technology. ITP is an intellectual playground for the artists and techies inside all of us.
I believe that game designers, artists, filmmakers, writers and interaction/installation designers are all storytellers. Our approach to the craft of storytelling is very different, obviously, but in the end, storytelling is the main tool we all use in our work. We all have a point of view and a vision that we are trying to convey via our work.
I understand that you moved back to Egypt to work on this project. Can you describe the work that you are doing in Egypt?
When I moved back to Egypt end of April last year, my main goal was to find the right partnerships, secure funding for this project and to start building our team in Cairo. I had to be in Egypt for us to be able to build this project and actually make it a reality.
We partnered with Emerge-Technology over the summer, a five-year old Cairo-based tech company founded by a few of my old Computer Science classmates and friends. They were the ideal partners because of their experience with HTML5 and because they are visionary technologists. Mohammed El-Shinnawy, one of the founding partners of Emerge and our current Technical Lead, immediately saw the power of our idea and the platform we wanted to build. He and his team were instantly on board after I showed them our early mockups and prototypes. They became partners with us on this endeavor and we started building the platform together in July.
I also met with many potential partners and individuals who were to become important supporters for the project. Moukhtar Kocache of the Ford Foundation in Cairo really opened the door for me here in Cairo. Moukhtar introduced me to Mossireen, an independent media and citizen journalism collective here in Cairo. Mossireen is doing amazing on-the-ground work in documenting the on-going revolution. Mossireen invited 18DaysInEgypt to a few round-table discussions with all projects and people in Cairo working on important initiatives like the National Archive head by Khalid Fahmy and the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, or the media-based Tahrir media-tent archive Thawra Media, Tahrir Radio an online political and self-expression radio station, Aotubees Al-Horeyya (the Freedom Bus) that set out to different governates over the summer, the Contemporary Image Collective Cairo that trains journalists and photographers in multimedia storytelling, photo-journalism, etc and also provides a free space and resources to the community – just to name a few of the amazing groups and initiatives that we brainstormed with and presented our work to. This was an opportunity not only to learn and partner with other initiatives but also to create a community of people who can help each other build and document Egypt’s ongoing revolution.
One of our main goals with 18DaysInEgypt was to also create an on-the-ground outreach program that we called the 18DaysInEgypt fellowship program. Egypt has low net-penetration; some estimate the number to be about 25% of Egypt is online. We want to make sure that 18DaysInEgypt is an inclusive project, not just about the 25%, or just Tahrir, but all of Egypt. Our goal with the fellowship program is to cover all of Egypt’s governates by hiring and training young students and journalists from different universities across the country who can then go out in their own communities to gather stories and document events from their governates.
We launched the fellowship program in January and already have six Cairo-based fellows working with us on the project including a community manager. We just raised $20,000 in funds via the crowd-funding platform KickStarter to now expand the fellowship across Egypt. The fellowship aims to provide equal opportunities for men and women. There is a lot of potential in the fellowship to develop it into its own education program. One hope for the fellowship is to institutionalize the training aspect by establishing a separate NGO, eventually. But currently, we are partnering with a local NGO with an existing network.
We are very excited about this program, our current test-run with six fellows has worked out
really well. These young men and women are very talented and enthusiastic and have done amazing work so far, that anyone can view on our live site – they’re the future of Egypt.
How has the project evolved with the recent political developments in Egypt?
For a long time we were limiting the project to just the first 18DaysInEgypt due to the sheer amount of data and media that exists out there, and also we were calling on the community to send us all their media, add tags and context to each individual piece of media. The smallest unit on the platform used to be one media fragment.
With all the ongoing events we were witnessing, we realized we had to open up the platform to include all the current events as well. We made sure we built our platform to be scalable and robust enough to handle that. That was the first major evolution in our project.
Can you describe how your project uses ‘crowd sourcing’?
The goal of 18DaysInEgypt is to tell the story of the ongoing Egyptian revolution through the point of view of Egyptians. We needed a collaborative storytelling platform to help us collect all these stories from the community and to continually tell the story of the revolution. The platform allows the community to upload, create and share their stories in an easy, visual way.
Anyone can easily register in one step using any existing social media account like Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo or Google. Once registered, we guide users through the storytelling experience via a dialog. The dialog asks the user the following questions: When did your story take place, and they can enter the start date for their story, which we use as a data point and a tag. Then we ask the user to enter a title and description for the story they want to share. Next, we ask the users where did you story take place? Using a Google map, the user can enter a location or pin it on the map. Finally, we ask users who else was there with them during that event or who else can help tell the story. We allow the storyteller to invite any of their friends to help them contribute media and help tell the story. 18DaysInEgypt will then send a notification to their friends.
After they complete the dialog, users land on the collection tools where they can access any of their media via their connected social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so forth. A user can add any tweets or posts from their Facebook timeline from any specific day, they can also add their own personal Facebook photos or albums, they can also add their own media from YouTube or Flickr or include any public media from those sites, if they themselves don’t have media from that specific event. We also allow users to upload any photos or videos of their computers and we provide a text tool for any type of written testimony.
Using these tools, users can create and curate many stories individually or with a group of people. It’s very easy to create a story and once they click "Publish," we create a visual, unified stream of their story to view on the site and share on any of the social media networks. This is our first iteration of collaborative storytelling platform and very soon we’re adding more features to make the storytelling process more engaging and more visually appealing.
The very nature of the platform is crowd-sourcing the story of Egypt’s history. Anyone can participate and anyone can create a story. We provide the platform they provide their content and point of view. We have many future plans on how the larger community can also participate, navigate and weave through this growing collection of crowd-sourced perspectives.
We plan to build a completely web-native, interactive documentary, where you can experience and weave stories and perspectives from the community in a seamless way. It will be a destination site now and in the future to experience Egypt’s ongoing history written by the people.
Is there a digital divide in Egypt? And, if so, how would you describe it? How do Egyptians use mobile media? How are you communicating about your project to citizens from all classes and backgrounds?
Yes, there is a digital divide in Egypt as I mentioned previously with regards to low net penetration. Also, the larger Egyptian community does not have a computer or laptop at home. We are very aware of this divide and are trying to tackle it with our on-the-ground outreach effort and by training students from all across Egypt to participate in the project via their own local communities.
Mobile penetration is obviously much higher in emerging markets like Egypt, however for technical reasons (we could not find easy Egypt-based solutions for SMS collection) and fiscal reasons (the cost of a MMS message or email is too high for us to ask mobile users to participate that way), we were unable to engage the community that way.
The biggest challenge for Egypt’s developing media landscape is reaching that larger audience. Citizen journalists, activists and young political parties understand these obstacles, and I know of political and cultural initiatives trying to engage the rest of Egypt. The more dialogue that there is with the outer governates of Egypt, the working neighborhoods within Cairo, and those that are part of the connected-informed, the better the transition will be for Egypt.
We suffer that same problem with our project. And we hope that our fellowship program is one way to tackle it. We are flexible and adaptable and can shift our focus if the fellowship program proves to be not successful enough in reaching that wider audience. It’s a problem that we will continue to face and we’ll be trying to find a workable solution.
Despite the current situation, I remain hopeful because I think this puts Egypt on the cutting edge of the next iteration of journalism, since citizen-journalism, collaborative journalism, and user-generated content is the next generation of journalism and storytelling. There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but Egyptians are a creative, tech-savvy people.
Can you describe some of the obstacles that the project has encountered?
Besides the issue of the digital divide in Egypt, the other main obstacle we are facing is communicating to the Egyptian community that this is their project as well. What I mean by that is many people come to the site to experience stories, but either don’t realize that they can also participate or they feel that they themselves don’t have important stories to share.
We need to better communicate that every story is important and what our goal and vision for this project is. We are relaunching our front page soon to more effectively communicate that.
This type of project and any new technology in Egypt will take a while before it takes off in the country. Early tech adoption is not common here and it will require an on-going engagement effort on our part. How can we make it an even less-barrier to entry? How do we reach more people? How do you convince the larger audience that their story is just as important? How do you teach a community to document their own history – something that has never been done before on this scale or effort?
How do you see mobile/new/emerging media being used (or not) in shaping the political future for Egypt?
Currently, there is a gap and/or delay between journalism and user-generated, citizen journalism. Yet journalism is evolving more and more to incorporate users and social media. In Egypt, there is an even more of a gap due to the complicated history and relationship between state media and the government. The reporting of Egypt’s Bloody Sunday (the Oct 9th Maspiro incident) is a sad example of how in conflict these two voices – the state-sponsored media versus the eye-witness accounts from the citizen-journalists – can be. The reason there is such a stark contrast in the reports has to do with what interests each voice is serving. The state media is serving the interests of the government, which means protecting the government’s interest, image and staying on message as the protectors of the people. The current transitional government is in a precarious position with a lot to lose and they are very entrenched in their ways – it’s an institution. The citizen-journalists that emerged out of the Arab Spring are interested in an open and free Egypt. They want democracy, they want change. They want transparency and want to expose the truth as they experience it. They want their voices heard.
Unfortunately, the state media has a wider outreach right now than the citizen journalists. That is due to the tools used by both parties. Egypt’s low net-penetration already limits the reach of citizen journalists who are usually using the Internet to broadcast their messages via blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, and websites. State media uses TV and controls the large newspapers which ensures the widest outreach in Egypt.
However, there are cases where new media or social media did find that massive outreach and influenced Egypt’s political climate. The obvious example is the story of Khalid Said, the Alexandrian twenty-eight-year old who was publicly beaten to death by two policemen. Khalid Said’s story and coverage started on social media first via bloggers and Facebook exposing the atrocity and the brutality he suffered at the hands of the police and his story spread like wild fire. The disturbing after-photos of his broken and beaten face were posted and re-shared all over Facebook. The abuse itself was documented and the videos posted to the Internet. His story became a very important symbol to the Egyptian people and the revolution.
I believe some of the independent media initiatives are finding their way catapulted on to the national stage, where they will have that wider outreach, using very creative means. One example that comes to mind is the comedian Bassem Youseef who has been described as the Egyptian Jon Stewart. During the first 18 days, his YouTube comedy was extremely popular for his political and cultural satire. Then he got picked up by a media organization, with a fully produced TV show. He still puts every show on YouTube to pay tribute to his early followers and his roots. He still tackles political issues on his TV show, and he’s not shying away from commentary via humor.
Other projects like the Kazaboon (Liars) project that exposes the media and current government’s mis-information by projecting videos onto public walls and spaces to reach people in the street. Tahrir Cinema was another imitative over the summer, that essentially created an open-space cinema in Tahrir Square where they would show videos, films, citizen-journalism documentation projects on a screen for those in the square to view. Another great initiative, which is a self-expression project called Mahsrou3 al Mareekh is essentially a nationally traveling open-mic stage for anyone to sing, perform stand-up comedy or political theater, etc, which is giving a platform for Egyptians who found their voice in #Jan25 a stage to continue using their voice.
I am seeing and hope to see more of these types of initiatives finding creative ways to reach and engage larger audience and helping shape Egypt’s political future. It’s an exciting time, and Egyptians are innovative, I really am optimistic that via these outlets, platforms and national-touring projects, Egypt will find a way to build and shape its political future.
Can you describe the finished experience of this project? What will it look, interact, feel like?
The finished experience is something we are working on currently. We are working with partners like Mozilla and Tribeca Film Institute to play around in this space and come up with what we believe is the next generation of transmedia storytelling and a new form for hybrid documentary. We were fortunate enough to be believed in by two institutions that are the leaders in storytelling – The Sundance Institute and the Tribeca Film Institute. Last year, for the first time ever, both institutes launched programs for this new space of transmedia storytelling.
The Tribeca Film Institute launched its first-ever New Media Fund last year, and we were one of the grantees receiving a $100,000 grant to develop 18DaysInEgypt. Tribeca is working with us closely to advise us as we move forward with the experience aspect of the project. Last year, the Sundance Institute launched its first ever New Frontier Storylab, which like the Producer’s lab and the Director’s lab, invites artists for a one-week lab of mentorship and workshops to explore the art form of storytelling with respect to each project’s individual goals and vision. The New Frontier Storylab focuses on storytelling in the transmedia space, this new emerging form where our imagination really is the limit.
We were one of the six artist projects selected to participate in the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Storylab. It was an amazing experience to work with leaders in transmedia storytelling. Some of our Creative Advisors during that week long workshop were: Cara Mertes, Director of Sundance’s Documentary Film Program; director/filmmaker Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country); Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment; Aaron Koblin, head of Google’s Data Art team; game designer Nick Frotugna (Playmatics); David Gale of MTVX; Lance Weiler (Pandemic); documentary filmmaker Noland Walker (Citizen King); and, Takaaki Okada (Condition ONE). It was a valuable experience in rethinking our approach to the final experience of the project by incorporating everything from lessons learned from game theory to more traditional film narrative.
How would you describe the role of the participants in your project? What do describe as (or anticipate as) their relationship or emotional reaction to the project?
The participants are the driving force for the project. They will set the tone and the scale of the project. A project like 18DaysInEgypt will not be successful without mass participation. We are just providing an empty canvas for participants to use, as they would like. It’s the beauty of a project like this; we cannot anticipate what it will eventually be. It’s a continually organically evolving living story.
We hope that participants see that this is their project – their story. We want the community to understand our vision and like us understand that this media is already disappearing and fading from our collective memory if they do not partake and start documenting what is still available and while it’s still fresh in our collective memory. When users come and see some of the stories that our early users have created they find it emotionally engaging because what they’re seeing is a relatable human side of the story. It’s not the headlines you see in the news everyday. For example, after the Port Said Massacre one participant named Shadi Hamid created a story called My Heroes of the Revolution, which was her own account of the Ultras soccer fans and what they mean to her and what they symbolize in the ongoing Egyptian revolution. That was the story that peaked in viewership after the soccer match massacre, not the stories that were just covering the events. I believe that indicates a need and interest for this more engaging subjective, personal perspective of the events in Egypt.
Currently, participants understand on an emotional and archival level the importance of a project like this. We anticipate that as the site continues to build that more participants will feel the pull to engage with us further and start adding their own personal stories for their own children or the next generation. Can you imagine ten or twenty years from now, their children going to 18DaysInEgypt to view their mother’s stories from this historic time in Egypt? That’s the type of emotional pull a project like 18DaysInEgypt has.
Do you think this project will reflect the pulse of the Egyptian people at this particular time? If so, how? How will the project demonstrate this?
I hope so. Currently, we haven’t hit that critical mass that really reflects the pulse of the Egyptian people, but it is most certainly our goal. For 18DaysInEgypt to truly reflect the pulse of the Egyptian people, it needs an enormous diversity of voices. I would say that currently our users are the more activist-minded participants who are still going strong in the marches and the protests. We also have a few stories about the Hezb Al Kanaba (The Couch Party or the silent majority). I would love to see stories by participants who were with the early days of the revolution but now have lost steam or diverged from the revolutionaries. I want to see stories from the soldiers and the military too. It’s important that all points of view are represented on this platform – whether you are for or against.
We believe with our on-the-ground outreach efforts we can start to cultivate this broader spectrum of a community. Tahrir is one thing, but Bedouins in Sinai have their own unique point of view just as falaheen do in Upper Egypt. How did they feel during those first 18 days as opposed to now? Who is against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces and who wants to be patient and see how things play out this coming year? Why did certain people never go to Tahrir until the anniversary? Who participates in the Mansour clashes? Who are the martyrs of the revolution – what’s their story? How about the politicians? What motivates them? What do they see as their role in the years going forward?
When we can engage more participants and collect all of these different perspectives, then yes, our project will correctly reflect the pulse of the diverse Egyptian population. Our vision is for you to be able to see the same event from these different perspectives and their own reflections. We want to give the viewer an informed choice about the person behind the story and how they are different from another person who experienced this same event. Egyptians are not a homogenous group of people, everyone has a different story and a different opinion about Egypt’s ongoing events, and we want to make sure to be inclusive of all these perspectives.
How do you anticipate viewers/users to interact with the finished experience? What do you hope they’ll experience or gain from it?
We anticipate that users will come to 18DaysInEgypt to learn about the reality and personal stories of how things actually are playing out in Egypt. We want to give users the ability and the tools to curate the experience they are interested in. For example, we want users to be able to juxtapose opposing narratives of the same event from not only different perspectives from the same city, but from different socio-economic strata, different governates in Egypt, different backgrounds, and people who have different goals for Egypt, etc. We hope the user will be able to not only learn about the diversity of the Egyptian populace, but also learn that things in Egypt are layered and complex and different people are suffering from different problems. If a user can relate and learn from someone from an opposing viewpoint or background, or if a user can learn about a city they knew nothing about then this project will be a success.
We will build all this into the experience. A way to weave the narratives by giving the user the choice. We are collecting many data points and tags from each story in order to so.
What is the final purpose or objective of the project? Do you plan to multi-source the material? Will it exist solely on the web or do you plan do create a longer format project (similar to Life in a Day or The Green Wave)?
The objective of 18DaysInEgypt is to be the first living history project written by the people who are living through it and experiencing it first-hand. There is no need for a linear historical narrative and there is no room for just one authoritative historical account. Technology has made this type of historical documentation outdated.
Everyone is a storyteller. We all share posts, articles our thoughts and our beliefs already on a variety of social media services. We all have a point of view and an opinion and our own personal experiences. These stories already exist across different services, but they’re currently scattered and buried under the avalanche of the always-newer events. Our goal is to pull all these media fragments and help users make a meaningful story out of them.
We imagine 18DaysInEgypt to be the next generation of storytelling. We believe that the best stories out there are those that are told together. We all are experiencing these important events with others, so by telling these stories together with those who were there with you, you can tell a more complete, multi-faced story. We see the name 18DaysInEgypt as a larger metaphor for what Egyptians are capable of; Egyptians are changing the course of history for their country, after all, they did topple a dictator of 30 years in only 18 days. That’s amazing!
I’m excited about 18DaysInEgypt being used to document the upcoming presidential Egyptian elections, the transition of the new government, and all the new historical milestones coming up in 2012.
Due to nature of this project, we cannot predict or foresee the final form. We have plans to make it a web-native living documentary that is continually evolving, where these characters you are following are real people with real streams out there. We want you to engage in a dialog with the participants after you view their stories. What are they doing now? Have they changed their mind or hopes for Egypt? You can currently click on any media in a user’s story to see the original source of the content or you can directly go to their current twitter feed and engage with them their in real-life. You can only accomplish this type of inter-connected relationship and dialog on the web.
That’s not to say that there can’t be multiple outputs for this type of project. One output of 18DaysInEgypt might still become a more traditional feature-film, but in that case we as the project creators are telling a story – we have to draw a line in the sand and tell the story that we want to tell. It’s not the same form as a web-native, interactive documentary, but there is definitely a place for a more, long-form film told by the creators using the characters and stories we want to use from the building collection of stories. I can also see 18DaysInEgypt content powering many other forms of digital storytelling like an interactive museum installation or public art space. The sky really is the limit.
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