From the Executive Director

“Do we turn on others, or toward others? Do we share our awakening, or only our despair? The choice is ours.”
                 Alice Walker

In the Alliance Innovation Culture Studio this year (the place where our HatchLab program lives, and new + interactive media projects are incubated), we have launched the Alliance Open Archive Initiative. Independent media organizations around the world may reflect the diverse cultural identity of communities, but they may also be rendered invisible because the content and stories generated are not being preserved, let alone shared openly. And we live in a world where open sharing of content may result in harm to the artists, producers and journalists who create the work, and well as the subjects who inhabit the stories. Despite advances in technology, media/culture archives are deteriorating at a rapid rate and stories are being lost forever. We felt an urgent need to collaboratively address this issue as a field, to find a collective voice, and to strategize emerging and best practices for creating impactful community-based preservation and access solutions.

The Alliance Open Archive Initiative brings together a group of cultural preservation and storytelling experts with independent, institutional and community-based content creators to collect and synthesize highly accessible, collaborative strategies that address three urgent core questions in the field today:

• WHO is telling and preserving the stories?
• HOW are organizations and artists addressing the challenge of getting their material preserved and making it accessible, usable, continuous and transformative?
• WHAT can organizations and artists do to keep pace with emerging and best practices of preserving and opening their digital archives?

In this first year of the initiative, we are gathering wisdom from the field in a series of in-person and virtual conversations, with some visionary archivists, technologists, culture bearers and storytellers. Caroline Rubens from Appalshop (Whitesburg, KY), Jamie Brett from the Museum of Youth Culture, Miranda Lowe at the Natural History Museum (London), Vincent Morisset at AATOAA (Montreal), Terri Francis from the Black Film Center/Archive (Indiana University) and Tanya De Angelis Sundance Institute Archives & Collection are just a few who participated in our first virtual conversation. We’ll be headed to Oakland on March 6 and NYC on March 18 and hope to hear from all interested folks along the way.

March is a big month on the road for The Alliance; in addition to the Open Archive meetings in Oakland and NYC,  we’ll be meeting with Designing Justice and Designing Spaces and Zero1 in the Bay Area, launching Arts2Work and planning The National Day of Storytelling in Atlanta March 2 – 6, and kicking off the first Arts2Work Pre-Apprenticeship program with our partner PhillyCAM in Philadelphia March 19 + 20. It’s a Spring Awakening.

As always, reach out my way anytime, wendy@thealliance.media.