International Day for Sharing Life Stories

Organisers are drawing upon an interactive website, called Ausculti (the Esperanto word for "listen"), to assist with information sharing and coordination of the campaign. Through this online platform, CDS and the Museum of the Person are calling on people to gather in community halls, classrooms, public parks, theatres, auditoriums, etc. to share their stories on May 16. They are also calling on organisations to mark the day on their websites and host virtual story circles via online chats and exchanges, and publication of new stories. Some of the other activities being suggested - and facilitated through an activity guide, available online - include:

• "story circles" in people's homes;
• public open-microphone performances of stories;
• exhibitions of stories in public venues as image, text, and audio-visual materials;
• celebratory events to honour local storytellers, practitioners, and organisations;
• open houses for organisations with a life-story-sharing component;
• online simultaneous gatherings, postings, and story exchanges;
• print, radio, and television broadcast programming on life stories, and;
• documentaries that feature oral histories and story exchanges.

Specifically, public events are planned in cities around the world each year, with ICTs used to connect and engage participants. An interactive online map shares details about these events - in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. ("This map is a collaborative tool. If you endorse, or if you are promoting an activity for the Day, you can create your own identification flag, give information about your organization, share life stories, news about the event you're promoting and also comment on the information of other flags on this map.") To cite one specific example, on May 16 2008, people around the world were invited to participate in a 20-minute-long online story circle on the 3-dimensional (3D) platform Second Life. Any group - professional or not - was encouraged to get organised and participate on May 16; an object known as "talking stick" was universally circulated around Second Life in the days prior to the Day. In each story circle, each teller prompted the next teller the American Indian way, by handing her the talking stick. The topic was a "miracle story", a story centred around what, by its impact on the teller's life, surprised him or her. The website is also a place for sharing thoughts about issues in storytelling work, storytelling examples and case studies, curriculum for schools, and other activities.

Each year, a theme is chosen to focus energies; in 2009, the theme is Journey for Justice – Migration and Refugees. The specific goal is to promote partnerships and collaborations between activists engaged in issues of human rights and immigrant rights with life story organisations. Specifically, they are calling on participating organisations and the public to share 1,000 stories (as text, image, audio, and video) as part of the online campaign. "Our goal is to create a google map that connects stories and organizations working with immigrants from all of these different communities."

Rights.

Nearly 300 organisations and individuals endorsed the 2008 Campaign.

The founder and director of one of the participating organisations explains that "Our two organizations see the movement to share life stories as a critical part of the democratic process. As our own work has expanded around the globe from our respective countries, we have found ourselves in dialogue with colleagues who have countless different approaches and perspectives to life story, but who share the sense that this work is vital to our contemporary societies." The director of the other organisation comments, "What has been lacking is a common call to celebrate all these different practices. Whether it is helping to collect a local oral history, encouraging new learners to share their life in writing, producing stories using analog or digital media, or exhibition of life stories online or through mobile technologies, we felt we needed a day to bring all these different practices - different roads to the same destination - together..."