Allied Media Conference

Presenters: The Beehive Collective

The purpose of this workshop is to build connections between activists that use words, and those that speak in pictures, to help create more accessible, powerful campaigns for the important issues of our time. The Beehive Collective has been creating and distributing anti-copyright, educational artwork for the past 7 years about social and environmental issues from biotechnology to the FTAA. In this workshop, we will use 'mind-mapping' as a tool to collect, organize and share the ideas generated by the whole group.

Presenters: Zane Scheuerlein and Marisol Becerra Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, Open Youth Networks

Google maps enables users to embed pictures and videos. By adding pictures and videos that tell the stories of the issues in communities across the globe, one can network and exchange strategies with other groups. In this interactive and hands-on workshop, we will show "The Cloud Factory," a youth produced video about environmental racism in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village. We will also present our mapzine and teach others to contribute digital content and essentially use Google maps as a tool of social action and community organizing. Workshop participants will create personal stories about the environment through digital media and embed them onto Google maps.

Presenters: Dean Jansen, The Participatory Culture Foundation; Steven Mansour, The Strict Machine Foundation

Commercial platforms like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook give activist mediamakers potential access to large audiences, but they also exploit your cultural labor, make money off of ads without sharing the revenuewith you, log your IP address and track your social networks, hand over your info to the government, and censor you if they are asked to do so by the government or corporations. Happily, the last couple of years have seen a real advance in free and open source tools to help you set up your own multimedia site. In this part-informational, part-hands-on workshop, we will zero in on some state of the art FOSS tools that you can use for video production and distribution.