The day dawned early and cool on 26 September for iCommons staff having promised to meet one another at the office at 7am to help carry equipment down to the Rosebank Shopping Mall where our scanning station was going to be set up.

By 9am we had the stand set up, laptops locked and plugged in, data projector in place and we were ready to go ... except that the data projector kept searching for a signal and our internet connection was non-existent. Apart from that, everything was perfect ;)

By 10am we had borrowed an esteemed colleague's data projector and called in the big guns to help us establish an internet connection.

Although the content sprint took off slowly we had quite a bit of interest from passers-by who stopped to browse the stand, asking questions and taking the free iCommons annual that we were giving away.

Our stand consisted of the scanning station where up to 8 images could be scanned at once; the uploading station, where images were licensed (either cc by or cc by-sa), captioned, tagged and uploaded to wikimediacommons; the recording station where people could record spoken memories; and a translating station, where translators took some recordings and captions and translated these into Xhosa, Zulu or Sotho.

In total we had 4 volunteers and 7 iCommons staff members.

The data projector was used to project the Jaiku stream that we had set up which aggregated uploaded content tagged with the iheritage tag from wikimedia commons and Flickr, and also displayed messages from the Jaiku iheritage group members. During the quiet moments, some crazy messages were sent to Jaiku: free beer! Free nappies!

At the end of the day our final count was 380 images tagged as iHeritage in Flickr; 18 images uploaded to WikiMedia Commons;
Approximately 15 audio memories.

All objects are tagged iheritage if you would like to look at the body of work to date. Please feel free to add your own images and objects to grow our collective heritage :)

tags: media-events

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