Welcome to the STORIES project! We will be using this site to keep stakeholders apprised of the project development process that we undertake during the 2009 calendar year, and we will be adding information and conversation to this site. For now, here is a motivational introduction to STORIES. If you have any comments or want to help, we are delighted to hear from you. For now you can send us email (stories@cs.cmu.edu) and soon you will be able to comment on a forum. Please do go to the Charters listed on the left and explore them. See where you would like to contribute.

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Three important trends are enabling an ambitious new view of the role that children and youth can play in society. First, technology for youth media production has empowered youth in programs around the country to produce compelling narratives in a form accessible to all. Second, community-based programs such as Robot 250 and Neighborhood Networks have demonstrated the enthusiasm with which youth will do inquiry, research and story-telling around issues of direct consequence to their community. Third, new wireless communication technologies and rapid-prototyping production technologies have created opportunities for media to be distributed to the public more broadly and comprehensively than ever before.

Consider the confluence of these trends in technology, advocacy and new media in enabling a redefinition of the relationship between children & youth and the region. Children and youth, viewed today as the responsibility of the public, as the object of caregiving, are seldom viewed as pioneers of the future. Instead, with a passive voice we often speak of children as those for whom we are responsible and we must decide what is best. What if children and youth were able to communicate their stories- their visions of life here and now, and their visions of the future of our region? What if their visions and stories were deeply influential to regional and civic decision-making? If children and youth can genuinely influence the future of our region, then we have not only directly invested in the leaders of tomorrow, but we have vested a large, young population with the power to make change. This is a new relationship in that children and youth are peers in our efforts to make the future better, to create the best possible quality of life for all inhabitants.

We propose to realize this new relationship by boosting the voices of children and youth. To boost their voices means to create skills for inquiry, leadership and story-making, then to wed the caring that is born of these skills with new technologies that allow children and youth to produce their stories and distribute them like never before. This project represents a marriage of the very old-fashioned lessons of leadership, rhetoric and story-telling with the very newest media tools for production, exchange, dialogue and documentation. It is the entire system- from motivational skills all the way to remarkable story dissemination throughout the region- that changes how the public views the stories and lives of children and youth, and changes how children and youth view their opinions, experiences and future as vital to the entire civic discourse.