PROJECTS
COMMUNITY BUILDING
It’s not so much about the de-professionalization of the news … as it is the expansion of news as a process that includes a community of participants, expanded textual forms, and a reconfigured production pipeline. Participation leads to greater engagement, inclusiveness, relevance … and better-informed communities.
William Urichhio in conversation with henry jenkins
OCEAN Community
Through a Regional Resilience Fellowship from the Open Future Coalition in 2024, we initiated an effort to ideantify educators, researchers, artists, scientists, creators and students interested in storytelling about our oceans. Our goal is to be a platform for innovative and entrepreneurial transmedia storytelling dedicated to ocean conservation and stewardship. All the projects enumerated on this page are initiatives of this communty.
METHOD: We hold monthly community meetings as a way of sharing progress and emerging ideas.
GOAL: Our goal is to incubate projects and take them to a point of being values driven, self-sufficient and sustainable entities.
NEWSLETTER
This Ocean Planet
This Ocean Planet is a publication coordinated by the Florida based 501 C 3 non-profit Media for Change INC. It is part of our One Water – OCEAN transmedia storytelling cummunity’s work. We publish this newsletter once every 2 months with a primary target audience of middle and high schoolers. Our goal in to inspire awe and wonder in our oceans and encourage young hearts and minds to engage with conservation and stewardship.
We are working with middle and high school students and their mentors internationally, and we invite other schools to join our storytelling community.
INTERACTIVE PROJECT
Dean’s Blue Hole
Inspired by the life an work of renowned oceanographer and free diver Claire Beatrix Paris, we are in the midst of creating a Virtual Reality experience targeted at school kids.
With a support from the University of Miami’s Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing the project involves creating an interactive experience where users operate a submarine and expore the blue hole with scientific guidance from Claire Paris.
Apart from learning about the physical appearance of the blue hole walls and life forms within it, users will listen to and learn about the vocalizations of variuos fish and what long term audio recording inside the blue hole reveal about how the ocean is changing.
GOAL: Our goal is to make this experience accessible in different languages through libraries, schools, public exhibits and museums.
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Ocean’s Call
The Ocean’s Call is a series of illustrated story books aimed at engaging young hearts and minds with the wonder and awe of the oceans. When four young middle schoolers discover a magical seashell on a school trip, they set off on an adventure across oceans and seas of the world, discovering marine communities and becoming a part of songs and stories across centuries. With each book, the four friends encounter different oceanic traditions across the world.
Based on a playlist of songs about the colors of the ocean created by Bhaswar Faisal Khan for our This Ocean Planet newsletter, this series of books will be offered in various languages internationally and distributed through educational organizations and schools.
IN DEVELOPMENT
While the above projects are in various stages of demonstrable progress, the One Water – OCEAN Community has several additional storytelling initiatives in development. These include as full-dome cinematic spectacle, a documentary film about scientific aspects of the shifting tectonic plates in Silfra, Iceland.