More ideas or more engagement?

OURMedia 6th International Conference held in Sydney is really more like a shopping mall than an academic conference. That's why the first question of the exit survey is about how many contacts during these four days one made. So I'd better talk about the interesting websites and media project we came across rather than the issues.

I like the Italian project of EuroMayDay which has been promoting an alternative image of workering class for the "precarious labourer". A group of Italian activists design a lot of interesting icons for people to make use of in their movement. As a catholic country, the icons of saint are so popular. They invent a holy icon for the precarious. They further design a lot of cards to showing some the images of different kinds of workers.

Remo.or.jp is an innovative project in Japan and Kazuya Sakurada, a member of indymedia Japan, is one of the founding members. It encourages people to make one-minute video clip with no camera movement, no sound, no special effect, etc. In the screening section, the several clips shown are about the unnoticed corners of ordinary neighborhoods. This reminds me of my beloved Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. But the major purpose of this "artistic" style is to create a level playing field for everyone who could use a handy camera. But this project might be relying on government's funding too much. Now they are lobbying the Osaka government to continue to fund their project. Without government funding, they might not be able to move this project on.

NGO in a box, launched by Tactical Technology offers a toolkit of free and open source software for NGOs. It might not be a very special project in the world. But what Hong Kong needs and lacks is exactly this kind of technical activists.

I learn a lot of old and new ideas from this conference. But it seems that ideas are much more than social analysis and engagement. For example, what problems does remo address in Japan? Why problems could the technical activists develop software to solve? Is "NGO" a good agents of social change? Or is it just a new "industry" flourishing in the civil society? It is a pity that the conference only succeeded in introducing seemingly good practices rather than in facilitating discussions on these issues.

Photo: May Day 2006