Learning with the Fang

Dave (LifeKludger) Wallace has just launched a little website for his day job that punches way above its weight. It looks simple enough on the face of it, but when you understand a little of the story behind it you will be confronted by something rather profound (and very cluetrain).

The site - history.dircsa.org.au - contains pictures and words that tell stories of South Australians involved with ‘disability’ through the years.

Simple enough on the surface, but wait, there’s more:

• This is no static website, content can be added relatively simply by uploading a photo to flickr, and adding a blog post with a few tags. Not only does this address the fact that the project cost less than a modest CMS, but it means virtually anyone could tell and contribute their story.
• Dave has developed an architecture and set of techniques that can scale without limit and incorporate any rich media type via popular social software - for example audio and video from podcasts or sharing sites like youtube or blip.tv.
• The tag based architecture allows for some pretty sophisticated User Interface improvements (like this).
• This mashup of popular social network services could be used for a ton of similar projects - for example a GLOBAL disability history project, language preservation, cultural mapping to name but a few.
• And many more other cool things Dave has thought about, but couldn’t get the resources to implement this time around.

Nice work Dave, I hope some day you get the kind of recognition you deserve (and funding so the the things you consipred can come to pass)

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:nptech, disability, history, southaustralia