#Technology – Initiative to Preserve and Share Stories around the World

..How would you like to be remembered?
…What was the saddest moment in your life?
…What is your proudest achievement?
…When did you first fall in love?

I feel quite strongly that Our Stories need to be recorded. At my brother’s house the other day we went through an old box of family memorabilia. What struck me forcibly was the ephemera. Those bits and pieces that usually get thrown away. The poem a soldier took into war with him written on a scrap of paper, the demob ration book that never got used, a tram drivers driving licence. So much of our lives is not recorded, even in our digital age. What is important to us may not seem important to our children. But it is the SUM of the whole that is important. Our collective stories tell a bigger story.

The Our Stories project is an attempt to preserve some of that ephemera, to preserve the stories from around the world. Their initial phase is about children and their lives.

Answering questions helps us frame the stories of our lives. As we speak, we become storytellers. As we listen, we hear echoes of our own lives and discover new worlds through others. By empowering storytellers and interviewers around the world to record and share their voices online, Our Stories™ aims to create a virtual archive of stories of everyday life.

Our Stories was founded by UNICEF, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), and Google, and to help collect, preserve, and share online the stories of the world’s people and their cultures and communities. The OLPC initiative, partnered with existing UNICEF projects, gives children the tools to interview, record, and share the stories of their parents, grandparents, and others in their families and communities. The focus during this phase is on children in developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where OLPC computers are available. Eventually, children and others will be able to share and access recorded stories directly through the Our Stories Children’s site.

Our Stories is also committed to providing access to people’s stories from around the world in their native languages. You can also hear stories collected by the Museum of the Person in Brazil, and by UNICEF from Ghana, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Uganda. And we anticipate adding stories from Argentina, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and other countries soon.

Explore the Find a story map and menu to hear extraordinary stories from the everyday lives of people around the world.

The Our Stories site also has free Interview Guides for children and adults. Whether you are recording interviews for the OLPC initiative, an oral history initiative such as StoryCorps® (one of our inspirations), or for a personal, family, or community archive, these guides and the Our Stories site will help you discover this wonderful way of preserving memories for the future.

Go to the Our Stories website