Million Plus

The ambition of the Digital Commonwealth project is to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to use freely available mobile digital (and social) media tools and techniques to ensure their voices are heard in a saturated (and often commercially) motivated media landscape.

The Digital Commonwealth project focuses on lowering the threshold for involvement for individuals and groups so that they can be empowered to exploit creative tools and technologies to tell their stories, digitally. The project reaches out to individuals and groups experiencing social, cultural or economic marginalization, whether related to age, ethnicity, poverty, disability or social isolation.

The Digital Commonwealth project has created:

• Four community media clusters in the North East, the East, the Central West and the South West delivering community media cafes and digital storytelling workshops focused on audio, video, blogging and social media. It also facilitates community media cluster meet-ups across Scotland
• A schools programme involving primary and secondary learners from across Scotland’s 32 local authorities, delivering in-school workshops on digital storytelling using audio, video, blogging and social media with supporting hard and e-copy learning materials
• Three creative voice projects (documentary film, creative writing & community songwriting) involving participatory workshops and benefitting individuals and groups in four areas around University of the West of Scotland campuses (Dumfries, Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire)
• A community reporting initiative for the Queen’s Baton Relay, involving individual beneficiaries and project partners, showcasing the rich tapestry of Scotland’s response to the Commonwealth Games and hosted on a specially designed and archived website