Participatory Video...

How I Heard About This: A friend working for an NGO in London is currently working on a number of PV projects
Main Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_video
Backup Source: http://www.insightshare.org/training_book.html
Topic: Style of Film-Making

Details: Unlike documentary filmmaking, where (often) a group of outsiders come in to make a film about a group of people, with PV, this group of people are allowed to make their own film. They are not schooled in the art of story creation, they simply make a film about something they care about in a way that they communicate naturally. Unlike with standard documentaries where people have little or no say in how they are represented, PV gives them full control over what is shown, and how it is represented.

To fully understand this method of film-making, and also to see why I feel this is important, take a look at its history:

"The first experiments in PV were the work of Don Snowden, a Canadian who pioneered the idea of using media to enable a people-centered community development approach. This took place in 1967 on the Fogo Islands, with a small fishing community off the eastern coast of Newfoundland. By watching each other’s films, the different villagers on the island came to realise that they shared many of the same problems and that by working together they could solve some of them.

The films were also shown to politicians who lived too far away and were too busy to actually visit the island. As a result of this dialogue, government policies and actions were changed. The techniques developed by Snowden became known as the Fogo process. Snowden went on to apply the Fogo process all over the world until his death in India in 1984." (Wikipedia)