The format of this project while interesting from an academic perspective has not resulted in the level of community engagement I had hope for. I think this is because the time between when I conducted the interviews and posted the resulting clips was too long. Despite their support for my work, my colleagues were no longer as engaged in the project by the time I put their clips on the public site. Were I to continue working with digital video and qualitative methods in community research in future projects I would change my approach to the work, and begin using a “Web 2.0” publication schedule rather then an academic timeline. What this means is that I would work quickly, using focus groups and other multiple stakeholder research processes, allowing the research participants a degree of control over their relationship to and position with respect to the camera, so this would also allow me to become part of the research group instead of controlling the experience of inquiry.

Sense participants watching footage

I thought Shrum et.al’s (2005) description in “Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium”, of a research dinner in which a camera was placed on a small tripod in the middle of the table and people took turns moving it to address themselves to the camera sounded very interesting from the perspective of opening up the research process to intervention from a number of different subject positions. Once an interview or focus group was completed, I would immediately post clips to a private channel on the web and allow my research participants a chance to comment, review, or pan the clips. Once those web-based interventions were done, I would create transcripts and then conduct an analysis. This kind of schedule follows a quicker turn-around in terms of publication, and thus works with all the research subjects’ sense of interest and investment.

In addition to re-thinking the publication schedule for community –based research it would be interesting to conduct a similar research project working with the youth participants in media training workshops. This population was considered outside the scope of the present enquiry but an exploration of how ideologies of youth, participation and media production are interpreted by participants would be a great compliment to research on workers in youth media projects. In addition, it would give great insight as to how youth as “audiences’ for, or “recipients” of agendas of social development view their own positions within systems of service delivery and social development.