Although a tireless advocate of using new technologies in Anthropology, I’m careful to encourage those technologies which employ open standards and avoid requiring proprietary technologies. That way you can be reasonably sure that your information won’t be tied up in some technology that will eventually be defunct. This is why I am rather critical of a project I discovered browsing the schedule of the 2005 Margaret Mead Festival which starts today. (The festival site itself uses an annoying Flash interface. Ugh!)

The project is DIALelebarrrio, which describes itself as an effort to “create an ’embedded’ documentary in the streets of Spanish Harlem” by “creating a ‘media cloud’ over the neighborhood.” What is a “media cloud“?

[It] is a metatphor for a specific location-based source of digital information. DIALelbarrio wanted to create the image of a cloud full of stories, music, images and video, unique to the culture of Spanish Harlem, that hovers over the neighborhood and can only be accessed when physically in the area.

The idea being that people who live in the neighborhood can upload images, stories, and text about their lives which is tied to that location and can be accessed via a cellular phone. That sounds kinda cool. Except when you read this:

Requirements

• Nokia 6600 series cell phone (6600, 6610, 6620) or the 6230
• SMS/MMS service on phone (can receive text, image and video messages)
• Use of Cingular or Cingular/ATT phone service
• At least 30 MB available ram on phone HD

To be fair, these are optimal settings, other systems may work as well, but are simply not officially supported. That’s the problem. They should support any cell phone, and should have a web-interface as well. It reminds me of the 1932 Literary Digest gaff when they predicted Landon would beat FDR based on a telephone survey in a time when only the very rich had cell phones. What kind of community history project needlessly restricts residents to a specific cell phone carrier or type of cell phone? (Or even to the requirement that you have a cell phone.)

If I was a participant in this project I’d want to know: will anyone be able to access this information in five years?

UPDATE: I happened to have dinner tonight with the project leader, Stephanie Owens, and she explained to me that the technical requirements listed on the site were out of date. When she started this project no service even offered MMS in the US, but she says it is spreading fast and they will update the site to reflect that. More importantly, the materials themselves are stored using standard audio, video and text formats, so they could be repurposed for other distribution channels. As far as I could tell, this project is still in its very early stages and so it will be interesting to see how it grows.