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Documentation & Storytelling

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Documentation, Datasets & Storytelling

Space Activity Documentation

We are documenting activities across all the integrated spaces. This builds institutional memory and creates a shared narrative of what happens within these interconnected environments. This documentation captures not just events but the texture of daily life, the evolution of projects, and the organic connections that form between people and ideas across spaces. The practice of documenting long-term builds creates its own temporal ecosystem, where documentation becomes a parallel creative process running alongside the primary making timeline. Think Mark Rober's elaborate project videos: the months-long engineering project generates daily documentation captures, weekly testing iterations, and ongoing narrative construction, all culminating in educational storytelling that spans multiple timescales.

The documentation timeline often becomes as complex as the build itself, creating opportunities for community engagement, collaborative problem-solving, and knowledge transfer that extend far beyond the original project scope.

Time-related concerns:

  • Multi-month build documentation: Capturing the full arc of complex projects from conception to completion
  • Iterative testing and storytelling: Medium-term cycles of prototyping, testing, and narrative refinement
  • Daily capture practices: Short-term documentation habits that preserve the texture of the making process
  • Educational synthesis: Transforming documented process into accessible knowledge for community learning

Methods:

  • Photography and video: Visual documentation of activities, builds, and community moments
  • Written logs: Daily or weekly notes capturing what happened, who was involved, what emerged
  • Project journals: Detailed documentation of specific builds, experiments, or initiatives
  • Community contributions: Inviting space users to document their own experiences and perspectives
  • Other ways: We're not limiting ourselves to only certain ways of documentation, maybe it can be a interactive storytelling page, but we make sure to archive most things.

Place based Documentation & Public data

Hyperlocal spatial understanding and community knowledge infrastructure. We focus on documenting neighborhood systems, collecting social and local data, and making it accessible for community use.

Hyperlocal Data Liberation & Curation

Inspired by the Data Liberation Project and Data is Plural, this focuses on the methodologies for making public data useful at a neighborhood scale.

Public data exists in abundance but often remains inaccessible, fragmented, or illegible at the neighborhood scale. Hyperlocal data liberation focuses on making this data useful where people actually live. We're trying to create curated datasets which transforms raw information into something actionable for communities, researchers, and journalists. The goal is not to replicate what government portals already offer, but to bridge gaps, add context, and make connections that official sources don't.

Core focus areas:

  • Identifying "dark" public data: Government records, administrative data, and institutional information that technically exists but remains practically inaccessible. Buried in PDFs, scattered across departments, or locked in formats that resist analysis.
  • Acquisition and cleaning: Building pipelines to extract, standardize, and validate data from messy sources. Census data, economic surveys, spatial datasets from various ministries serve as raw material. The work lies in cleaning, contextualizing, and connecting these sources.
  • Structuring for local relevance: Organizing data around geographic and thematic categories that matter to neighborhoods - ward-level, street-level, building-level where possible
  • Participatory curation: Engaging communities in identifying what data matters, validating accuracy, and adding local knowledge layers that official sources miss. This creates datasets that reflect lived experience.
  • Small data approach: Depth over breadth. Hyperlocal focus on community-relevant metrics rather than attempting comprehensive national coverage. A detailed dataset about one ward's water access patterns is in certain times more useful than a shallow scrape of national statistics.
  • Connecting official data with ground-truth observations: Government data shows what's supposed to exist; community observations show what actually exists. The gap between these tells important stories.

Questions that needs answering:

  • What are the primary technical, bureaucratic, and social barriers to accessing and using public data about their own neighborhoods?
  • What frameworks enable communities to collaboratively curate and maintain local datasets over time?
  • How can we measure the impact/usefulness of increased data accessibility on community decision-making and advocacy?

References:

Documenting local and ecological stories

Local ecosystems, both natural and urban carry stories that often go undocumented. The relationships between communities and their environments, the seasonal rhythms that shape daily life, the flora and fauna that share neighborhood spaces, and the environmental changes unfolding over years and decades all form a living archive worth preserving. Documenting these stories creates a foundation for understanding place, informing decisions about land use and conservation, and maintaining connections between generations and their environments.

Focus areas:

  • Urban ecology and neighborhood ecosystems: Documenting the natural systems that exist within and around built environments—street trees, water bodies, wildlife corridors, informal green spaces
  • Traditional ecological knowledge: Recording community knowledge about local plants, seasonal patterns, land management practices, and human-environment relationships passed down through generations
  • Wildlife and biodiversity: Tracking species presence, behavior patterns, and population changes at a neighborhood scale
  • Environmental change documentation: Long-term observation of how local environments shift—water levels, vegetation patterns, species composition, climate impacts
  • Community-environment relationships: Stories of how people interact with, depend on, and steward their local ecosystems

References:

  • Canopy collective: brings together researchers, artists, local communities, and grassroots leaders to reimagine wildlife conservation in Northeast India.
  • Mod Foundation: is a Bengaluru-based interdisciplinary urban research and action institute focused on design-driven exploration of India’s urbanisation. It studies everyday urban spaces through mapping, visualization, and hands-on design.
  • Vidhi Legal Policy
  • Bengawalk: Bengawalk is a Bengaluru-based creative urban initiative using storytelling, film, and design to make cities more walkable, people-centric, and sustainable. Through data-driven tools and community engagement, it sparks public conversations on urban planning, mobility, and quality of life in Indian cities.
  • Digital Futures Lab: Independent, interdisciplinary research studio that studies the complex interplay between technology and society in India and the Majority World.
  • PARI: Serves as a living journal and archive to record the everyday lives of the 833 million people in rural India. The site features stories, videos, and photos in 15 languages, covering topics like climate change, farming, and endangered crafts. Through PARI Education, it brings rural stories into school and college classrooms to younger generations.
  • Centre for Science and Environment
  • Oorvani Foundation: Connect people who want better cities with the information, resources and networks they need to make it happen.
  • WRI India: Independent charity legally registered as the India Resources Trust, provides objective information and practical proposals to foster environmentally sound and socially equitable development.
  • Citizen Matters: Citizen Matters is a civic media platform with insightful reports on critical urban issues, ideas and solutions for cities. Our canvas spans the breadth of urban living: we dive deep into issues which affect our quality of life, including water, commute, public safety, air quality, governance, education, environment, local economy and livelihoods and more.
  • livinglabs network and livinglabs institute

Community storytelling

Making data legible transforms abstract numbers into stories that communities can engage with. Visualization bridges the gap between data availability and data understanding. Most people will never read a CSV file or query a database, but they will spend time with a well-designed map or chart that answers questions they care about.

What to focus on:

  • Geographic storytelling: Connecting data to place and lived experience. A map of flood-prone areas means more when people can find their own street on it.
  • Temporal patterns: Showing change over time, seasonal rhythms, historical shifts. Static snapshots miss the dynamics that communities experience daily and yearly.
  • Comparative views: Enabling communities to see themselves in relation to benchmarks - other neighborhoods, state averages, their own past conditions. Context makes data meaningful.
  • Interactive exploration: Letting people ask their own questions of the data rather than only seeing pre-defined views. The best visualizations invite curiosity and support discovery.
  • Mapping: Spatial representation grounds abstract data in physical reality. Maps reveal patterns invisible in tables - clustering, proximity, access gaps, territorial boundaries that shape everyday life.

Examples/Inspirations:

Projects

seed

Wikipedia Entry Drive for Guwahati

Year-long initiative to document and improve Wikipedia coverage of Guwahati

More coming soon...