CHORUS: Civic Heritage and Oral History Unification System

Problem: The decline of effective local agency

In most communities, civic engagement opportunities are limited to voting and appearing in public for either formal meetings or civil disobedience. Those are the antiquated town hall and voting booth models that have not scaled up to modern cities. The town hall model relies on having all the right people, in the right place, at the same time in pursuit of equity and justice. Voting booths are not places of debate, but of decision. In this era, when time and attention are arguably the most valuable commodities, we need a new method of contributing to public debate. Community members should be able to share stories and have a meaningful impact on their community. 

This trend has been documented as far back as 1958 in Vidich and Bensman’s ethnographic study, Small Town in Mass Society: Class, Power, and Religion in a Rural Community. The authors detailed how contemporary bureaucracies focus power on local, affluent individuals at the expense of local agency. The model of modern politics still looks like the town hall but the original potential for meaningful civic engagement that method embodied has been diluted to the point that direct meaningful participation is seen as onerous, useless, or both.

Even in nations with mandatory voting, local control tends to be restricted to those with more economic power (OECD Better Life Index, 2012). Worldwide, young adults (18-29) are 15% less likely to engage in electoral politics (UN World Youth Report, 2016), and the recent CSO Engagement Report from the European Parliament found only 17% of all ages surveyed had engaged in public discussion, debate, or dialogs (Eurobarometer Survey, 2020).

Participation via social media tends to have twice the engagement rate but is easily manipulated and has low efficacy. Manipulated consent is a serious threat to faith in public debate in the wake of scandals, such as Cambridge Analytica, Ltd. scraping and manipulating Facebook data. Individuals are increasingly isolated from community interactions and local political interactions even more so. If they ever act politically in person, it is usually on a discreet issue.

As mass media tends to rely on advertisement revenue in editorial decisions, locals who wish to be heard often have to rely on desperate political action, even violence, to have their story taken into account by decision makers. As they lack legitimate and effective channels to express their agency, small groups are increasingly employing extreme action to gain access to effective media platforms. They have to make their stories so outrageous to compete with sensational events. Most people remain on the sidelines, not exercising their agency.

Lacking stories, or a legitimate platform to share stories, people cannot overcome bias and learn from one another.

Solution: Map Oral Histories
Storytelling is the civic skill par excellence. Give a storyteller someplace to speak, and they can lift an empire off the backs of the oppressed (Anonymous, n.d.).

Our solution validates locative storytelling as a legitimate tool of community change employable by anyone who can tell a story; and we believe everyone can tell their story. We want to build a public infrastructure of stories—a narrative infrastructure—that elevates the voice of local citizens on an ongoing basis. We want that map of stories, with an accuracy of 220 meters, to be comparable to economic study maps, flood zone maps, transportation maps, etc.

The Civic Heritage and Oral History Unification System (CHORUS) focuses on community members and helps them recognize and reinforce their informal traditions by teaching them to gather stories and tell new stories, blending past stories with new ideas. Developers and politicians can use narrative infrastructure to enhance continuity with project proposals by contextualizing new initiatives with the local sense of identity.

Used over time, CHORUS allows people’s lived experiences to meaningfully impact the evolution of their immediate location now and in the future. It also allows a creative mode for community members to ask “What if…?”, using their neighbor’s stories to propose new ideas. They can take a developer’s national or international phenomenon and compose a story that blends that idea with local stories to discover how to introduce that business model in continuity with the past, not in contrast to the past.

CHORUS establishes a virtuous cycle wherein community members learn more about each other through stories, and those same stories are referenced by economic developers and policy makers who enable additional story collection as a best practice because stories collected for one event or proposal remain potentially relevant and useful for subsequent issues. These cycle back to the community members who see change not as loss of the landscape of their memories, but evolution of their neighborhood in continuity with their own sense of their past.

A spatial story told today is held by the land, and is relevant to that region more or less indefinitely. Future public activity can leverage that same effort already extended by the storyteller. When the storyteller is quoted, the reference system we propose will automatically notify them that one of their stories is being used for supporting or countering an idea. Rather than having to scan constantly local media, notifications of personally important issues will be emailed directly to the storyteller.

By utilizing a tool that predates the invention of agriculture, the majority of humanity already has the most important skill: storytelling. Initially, we propose to provide training to hone those skills (story craft) through a program that is transportable to high school classrooms for practical application of civic lessons. Later, the tool will be general purpose, suitable for teaching to and use by citizen scientists, NGOs, political action groups, developers, etc.

Large swaths of humanity are struggling to find an effective means of civic engagement given the constraints of modern lifestyles. As the fundamental skill for civic engagement is telling one’s story and interpreting another’s story, the clear entry point is the educational system. Using the established curricula requirements for large educational systems, we can help students both gain civic skills and contribute their own voice to local issues.

In the long term, this solution serves the working class. Contrasting the investment class and the working class, the biggest distinction is not money, but time. The working class sells their time for money. A key factor in participating in political coalitions or public meetings is time. Those with more time can spend time making phone calls, knocking on doors, lobbying representatives, writing blogs, and making videos. Unfortunately, any effort to contribute to public discourse today has a very short shelf life given the current method of public engagement. As currently practiced, civic engagement requires consistent attention and effort, which requires time.

All of those activities (phone calls, lobbying, writing blogs, etc.) are utilizing storytelling, but on a cross-sectional basis: one effort affects one issue. A map of authentic stories provides a longitudinal approach to public participation: a story told and mapped once can be impactful on many issues over a long period of time.

Opportunistic policy or development that suffers from short-term-ism will be much easier to oppose when the marshaling of effective public stories takes minutes instead of months. As a result, it will be in developers’ and politicians’ best interests to consult narrative infrastructure early in their processes, rather than be blind-sided by a well-organized wave of public stories that contradicts their plans. This should result in proposals that take significant influence from local stories, leading to an ever-richer sense of place for the target population.

Several ancillary benefits of narrative infrastructure directly improve the lives of participants:

• transmitting cultural knowledge to the next generation,

• to researchers, and

• to immigrants.

It can also contextualize historic preservation efforts by providing contemporary stories co-located with ossified stories.

First and foremost, CHORUS takes the agency of the working class and extends its usefulness over a much longer time.

The platform of CHORUS, Story City, has been serving communities around the world for eight years, helping community members to create transmedia locative stories to promote tourism and awareness of local issues. Story City has matured from a scrappy NGO start-up to an established company with a technical support team, spatial storyteller coaches, governance, and finance. Narrative Infrastructure is a heady concept, and Story City provides a mixture of political and entertainment modes to expand its user base by leveraging typical social media incentive patterns (sharing with friends and family, receiving group membership affirmation).

Our team is composed of educators, urban planners, architects, and community empowerment professionals with a successful track record in helping communities compose and deliver locative stories. We have a diversity of experience engaging with educational institutions, NGO groups, chambers of commerce, and civic authorities as large as Texas and as small as village councils.

Our team’s focus on narrative as mode and method allows us to help communities convert tragedy to comedy. A tragedy is defined by heroes, villains, victims, and the sacrifice needed to cause change. Comedies are characterized by the clever masses subverting the outdated expectations of current power groups and developing novel approaches.

One example we used took the heartbreaking story of discrimination between children and used that story to create a new opportunity for reconciliation:

In Cyprus, an island rent in two by conflict between a Greek/Turk cultural divide, a storyteller in Famagusta related how years ago he and his fellow Turk-Cypriot friends played marbles in an empty lot (still empty to this day) while the Greek-Cypriot children watched from the edge of the lot. The Greek-Cypriot parents forbade their children from playing with the Turk-Cypriot children. This story originated before the war that politically cut the island in half. Today, Famagusta is struggling to realize its potential as a tourist destination. It is a walled city built by Venetians, improved by the French, and remodeled by the Ottomans. It lacks café space to meet local and visitor needs. Our proposal was to re-purpose the disused lot to make a new café named “Losing Our Marbles Together.” It took the tragic story as inspiration to develop a new place, with a comedic twist, for reconciliation (https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/ni_pilot.html).

On the other side of the world, in Edmonton, Canada, Story City helped curate a series of educational walks (https://about.storycity.app/downtown-social-justice-walk/). The Mustard Seed’s Community Engagement team fosters an understanding of poverty and homelessness to transform worldviews and mobilize the community. The team recorded a series of walking tours for people of all ages to broaden their knowledge of issues surrounding poverty and homelessness in Edmonton. In humanizing the plight of the homeless in a multisensory mode, the audience could literally follow the footsteps of their homeless community members. This method helped to overcome unexamined biases, expanded common ground, and made the immediate urban context more meaningful.

We have a live prototype that was developed in a community setting in Famagusta, Cyprus (https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/ni_projects.html). This prototype was grant funded by the Eastern Mediterranean University and involved partnering with the local neighborhood association, MASDER (https://magusasurici.com/), who have been recording oral histories for over eight years. 

MASDER provided 60 recordings, five of which were translated (n=5) using grant funds and processed using spatial narratology, the technique developed by our research team to code and map the narratives.

The results were presented to the MASDER community, leading to an ongoing relationship between our research team and the community. Even in its prototypical stage using open source GIS software, the project continues to inspire the community to assert their heritage.

Story City has been in operation for 8 years, providing a platform for fiction writers and community service organizations around the world. CHORUS represents a bold vision by CEO Emily Craven to leverage stories to expand civic engagement and the market for locative fiction.

Monetary: Civic Engagement Improvements to our Existing Platform

On the financial side, we need funding for programmer time to adapt a spatial ethnographic methodology into our existing product. Among other tasks, this involves both the back-end programming for a line-data editor for transportation maps that provide story catchment areas. Funding will also be applied to adapting our front-end Creator Lab (https://about.storycity.app/creators/) to empower community members with intuitive tools to map their own stories and to adapt the interface to demonstrate how their stories overlap with other storytellers. The result has already been prototyped in Famagusta, Cyprus, using commercial GIS software and qualitative analysis software (https://www.narrativeinfrastructure.org/ni_pilot.html).

Technical: Data Integrity

One technical benefit we hope to discover by working with the community of SOLVE is open public ledger skills so we can secure the archive. One of the requirements for a narrative infrastructure is that it be tamper-proof. The authenticity of local voice needs to be protected through a trust-less block-chain that mirrors the archive across different servers. If ever someone attempts to misquote a teller, it must be detectable. Such would-be author-itarians need to be discoverable and their work disavowed.

Secondly, we need help developing a feasible protocol for monitoring and throttling traffic in the archive. Data harvesting from this archive would be a fundamental debasement of the infrastructure. CHORUS is meant to elevate the individual voice, not consolidate content into a dataset for statistical analysis, and, thereby, dilute individual agency.

Technical: Intellectual Property Rights

The other technical boon we seek is developing a token system that will do two things: when a story is quoted, the token will prove that it is not pirated or a fake story, and it will automatically alert the teller, via email, that their story is being used by someone. Keeping in line with the newer data privacy laws and intellectual property laws, that token will be one-half of a key used for takedown of the narrative. The original teller will have the other half of that key so they can have their stories removed from the archive.

Over the long term, we would like to incorporate an interface that allows other media to be included by the users, allowing the framework to be a full spatially indexed, digital cultural heritage archive.

Technical: Partner Integration

We have identified seven publicly funded research support organizations that could streamline government procurement from CHORUS and evolve CHORUS into a global platform integrated into academic research portfolios, as well as organisations like Story Corps who already collect large databases of relevant local stories to narrative infrastruture. We need help meshing our digital framework with theirs. Benefits we hope to garner are:

• Identity, authentication, and authorization management

• Data stewardship and preservation

• Distributed secure storage resources

• Pre-commercial procurement support

• Public procurement of innovation support

• Archive funding

Everything around us in the built world started as a story.

Our research leads us to conclude that narrative infrastructure has always informally been the basis of politics: ideas building on ideas over decades and centuries. The evolved urban landscape we see today can only be described by telling those stories, and we convince each other to change this shared world by telling our stories. Story City wants to build CHORUS to archive community stories and index them according to the settings in the stories, not by language. CHORUS improves on the antiquated town hall model by making local stories available for all parties to current and future debates. We aim to formalize this informal pattern; something not easily done prior to the advent of geographic information systems.

With GIS mapping tools, we can record community stories to the land and quickly sort which stories are relevant and which are extraneous to many common local issues. While these are not a replacement for direct engagement, we can improve the typical public participation model because many more voices can be included.

Textual archives of stories and social media have limited local applicability when limited to keyword searches. That Boolean logic is very limited, and you will miss many spatially relevant stories or digital media posts that failed to include the hashtag or keyword by which you searched. But a spatially indexed archive is held by the land. The language does not even matter (with online translation available from many reliable services); the spatial coordinates are more valuable for local initiatives. 

The CHORUS format encourages a creative approach to civic proposals and debate by granting areas of affect--as opposed to points of impact--to the stories. From there, users can find stories that can interact with other stories. Stakeholders can compose new stories by combining existing, overlapping stories that are in continuity with the past stories.

In addition to finding common ground, the tapestry of spatially indexed stories can help us identify domain conflict points and unconscious community biases:

In our prototype in Famagusta, we presented the results of spatial narratology and proposed three development proposals that would fill gaps detected in a sentiment map. One of those proposals was the apportioning of lands for future hotels. The community group, the source of the narratives, confidently disagreed and said that several alternative-but-specific blocks of modern housing should be developed with  hotels. Our team was taken aback, as those houses had families living in them. On review of the narratives, it was discovered that the housing blocks in question were empty fields when the storytellers were children growing up in Famagusta. We had uncovered a bias that impinged on equity.

By combining the literal oldest technology, storytelling, with geosynchronous satellite positioning systems, this method is a fundamentally different way of thinking about enabling civic agency. The method propagates an individual’s agency down the X-axis of time so a single contribution can provide sentiment and context to all local changes that come later.

Civics education simultaneous with civic engagement

Our immediate impact goal for 2024 is the drafting and dissemination of CHORUS lesson plans to high schools in 10 cities. We will be adapting a spatial ethnographic class already developed for the Kharkiv School and Ro3kvit Urban Coalition for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Civics education is as much about continuity as ingenuity; so, training students to integrate interview methods with mapping methods teaches them how the land binds a community together through stories.

1. Through listening closely to stakeholders, students will see their neighborhood through the stories of their community.

2. They then will be tasked with combining existing stories with mapped data sets of ecological issues, and combining the local stories and the natural stories into their own proposed story -- a creation of their own.

3. Lastly, they will repeat the exercise by incorporating a story proposed by one of their fellow classmates. This will drive home the issues of continuity, of complexity, and of thinking ahead rather than the past or just of today. These will be absorbed as the main point of civic engagement.

4. Students will learn how to use ethnography to examine stories, and how to apply that knowledge to create inspirational stories for local societal change. Each story that a student collects is a building block for their own community. They will have demonstrably contributed to their community.

Ten examples of this exercise will provide enough feedback to improve the pedagogy, but also will reach 10 new markets where mapped stories can be presented to chambers of commerce, neighborhood elected officials, non-profit groups, and other economic and political stakeholders who will benefit from a map of public sentiment.

Over the next five years, the goal is to build coalitions in those markets to support municipal development code updates that mandate the review of available public narrative infrastructure in development proposal evaluations and applications for variances.

This will engage a virtuous cycle wherein those seeking urban change will:

1. have better market information,

2. realize better public adoption of their proposals,

3. go on to make more meaningful improvements to the neighborhood, and

4. lead to greater demand for locative stories by other urban change organizations.

Triangulating CHORUS effect

The SDGs must be both globally comparable and nationally relevant. By its nature, the United Nations works with very large statistical numbers. Large statistical population models are the antithesis of personal agency, which is the prerequisite for civic engagement. To expand the capacity for civic action, we must empower people to meaningfully influence how their communities evolve.

Our lead researcher’s first encounter with locative storytelling was in 2009 while using Google Earth with the photo layer turned on. He was seeking collections of geolocated photos of interesting places to visit in Morocco for studying folk stories from the Alf layla wa layla (Arabian Nights Entertainments). He found a large group of photos mapped in the empty desert. The photos were pictures of a drunken party at a different location. These partygoers had no legitimate channel for sharing the photos of their activity that was not subject to censure or punishment. Thus, they hid their story in the desert. The land was acting as an archive for these young people who were exploring the boundaries of their culture.

We do not have to bury treasure in the desert or immortalize every story in stone on every street corner. Like the partygoers in Morocco, we can let the land hold the stories virtually. The most critical metric of CHORUS’s goal is, like any distributed infrastructure, area saturation.

Initially the measure for CHORUS is area saturation beyond the infusion of stories facilitated via the classroom courses. If a market increases the number of mapped stories after - and independent of - the classroom activity, that increase indicates local practice of the methodology. The density of stories over a geographic area will provide a comparable metric for market adoption.

The students might continue with the project independent of the class (which we can track by user activity in the app). This would indicate that the students have embodied the community value of mapped stories. Plausible reasons for this include desire to exercise agency, to engage their peers on social media, or to entice local businesses, for a fee, so they can improve their product with local stories (like a tourism company or real estate developer might do).

In the long term, the employment of mapped stories will be demonstrated as: 

• quotes from the mapped stories in local news articles,

• public announcements, and

• political campaign media.

This data can be derived from web analytics (both of citations and by using character-matching models similar to plagiarism detection software.)

To evaluate the impact of both these metrics, we will pair before-and-after community surveys  to evaluate the perceived change in personal agency.

We will use this triangulation of metrics to validate the efficacy of CHORUS through saturation, use, and subjective evaluation by the participants.

Story City provides an app for recording geolocated stories and sharing them with the community. Our theory of change is that accurately mapped oral histories will increase perceived civic impact by individuals, leading to a host of outcomes benefiting the community–all centered around the long-term improvement to individual agency.

CHORUS's lesson plans help students record and map community stories and use them to come up with new ideas for their community. Those narratives become the first inputs towards leveraging a well-documented phenomenon of how stories are integral to civic engagement with measurable outputs (Proshansky, Fabian, & Kaminoff, 1983; Aravot, 1995; MacKian, 2004; Sandercock, 2010; Ivory, 2013; Filep, Thompson-Fawcett, & Rae, 2014; Tassinari, Piredda, & Bertolotti, 2017).

The immediate result for the students will be an enriched sense of their community and the applicability of stories in civic issues. They will craft the building blocks for follow-on boons.

The outputs from our prototype provided insights into what the community should add to satisfy a market need in a way that also could help heal a generational rift between once-warring ethnicities. The same prototype project uncovered subtle biases that could then be mitigated against to reduce inequity.

The use of CHORUS's narrative infrastructure by any party in a policy debate will spur greater adoption by the affected community (O'Looney, 1998). This output is supported by the field application of narratives by government planners in Australia (Dunstan & Sarkissian, 1994, pp.75-91) to improve community uptake of policy and feedback validation (Childs, 2008).

Once narrative infrastructure is established as a resource for support of propositions, it will become more common. Unlike short-form social media posts or surveys, each addition to the narrative infrastructure makes it stronger and more useful. This will result in a virtuous cycle, wherein interest groups will use CHORUS, and subsequent or competing interest groups will seek to expand the archive to counter any selection bias. Action groups will engage in story collection, politicians will seek to add stories, and developers will want to find local stories.

The outcomes we aim to achieve are greater civic engagement rates in working class communities. This will surface as increasing narrative infrastructure saturation, tenancy duration (Scannell & Gifford, 2010), building permits for major repairs in narrative ranges as compared to other regions of the city (Brand, 1991), and quotation of narratives in local media (Throgmorton, 1992; Ball-Rokeach, Kim, & Matei, 2001). We see excellent potential for using narrative collection and mapping as a way to empower neighborhood residents to organize effectively around political issues (Shanahan, Jones, McBeth, & Radaellf, 2017). These outcomes will be evaluated with app usage data, web analytics, and user surveys.

Our review of the research has uncovered locative stories that predate the current interglacial age; that were transmitted orally for at least 350 generations (Reid, Nunn, And Sharpe, 2014). We posit that genuine sustainability of the human built world is predicated on the modern application of geolocated storytelling.

CHORUS: Civic Heritage and Oral History Unification System

The core of our technology, of CHORUS, is a geographic information system (GIS) to help stories persist and be locally relevant by mapping them to the setting described in the narrative. We then apply an area of effect (220 m, based on visual range and mental cuing of the associated memories) to each narrative to demonstrate the range a narrative has in the mind of the teller of the story.

By establishing an area of influence of a story, the overlap of otherwise unrelated stories demonstrates common interests. By using the land to hold the stories, we do not need to compel the interested parties to coordinate a time and place to meet to share stories. The relevance of any two colocated stories is demonstrated by the common land, so the participants know which stories to review, and, because the stories are archived, the participants can review them in their own time, share with others, revisit later, and develop nuanced understanding of other storytellers’ perspectives.

• The justification and methodology for this core technology is explained with graphics on our introductory video (https://youtu.be/0HtgHbgCm7Q?t=416, minute 7).
• The working prototype project at Famagusta, Cyprus, can be explored at https://www.narrativeinfrastru...
• Our creator tools for making spatial stories are discussed at https://about.storycity.app/creators/.

Quality Assurance

A digitized map interface is the public face of our core technology; it facilitates consumption of the stories and allows spatially relevant stories to be demonstrated with one click. The backroom of our core technology is proposed to explicitly deny access to the archive by machine learning algorithms and protect the intellectual property rights of the tellers. As the nature of personal agency is fundamentally debased by statistical analysis, access to the archive is limited to a daily quota with real-time traffic monitoring to thwart harvesting of the narratives. In order to maintain the authenticity of the narratives, we plan to distribute the archive to several university servers around the world in a blockchain. This will ensure all users of the archive that no one powerful actor (such as a nation state) could ever debase the content of a narrative and change the story.

An Ancestral Technology was the original Global Positioning System:

Stories are the original “viral media.” A good or useful story can persist for thousands of years. In example, first nation peoples of Australia used oral stories to create navigation paths across the continent. These “song lines” were composed of stories where the characters were mythical creatures that resembled the landscape. So long as you saw the characters of your story as you walked, you knew you were following the line. In this way, one of the most ancient human cultures mapped an entire continent.

In 2014, researchers were following a song line when it abruptly ended in the waters of the Indian Ocean. A fellow researcher pointed out that the landscape beneath the waves continued the story. The only conclusion is that this oral-tradition story dates back to at least the previous ice age: 10,500 years ago, when the sea level was lower. This is just one example of the persistent utility a good story has. This one story, never written down, predates the invention of agriculture (Reid, Nunn, And Sharpe, 2014, https://www.academia.edu/download/38936810/OralTradSeaLevelsREID.pdf).

The skills for crafting an entertaining story or a politically persuasive story are exactly the same. Story City has been helping people and groups around the world learn to tell spatial stories for both entertainment and civil issue awareness raising.

Like the first peoples of Australia, we want to hybridize the telling of stories using the land over time. The landscape is our nonnegotiable common interest: everyone must physically be somewhere. When we acknowledge the land between us to be of interest to both parties, we share common interests. We may use the land differently, at different times of the year or day, but we must negotiate how to share common interests. This is politics.

Formalization of Politics in Ancient Greece:

To work or act as a group, the necessary civic skill is storytelling. Practicing politics is being able to craft a narrative that convinces others for or against an idea or course of action. This was discussed in ancient Greece by Aristotle who defined rhetoric in politics as the use of passion, logic, authenticity, and awareness of current conditions (pathos, logos, ethos, and kairos) in order to persuade others.

The challenge storytelling, honed with rhetoric, overcomes is the nature of the human mind to turn phenomenon into symbols in order to make interacting with the world more efficient. Applied to other people, we call this prejudice. This is normal and commonplace, but inappropriate when actions based out of prejudice will materially or politically impact others. Storytelling lends context to a person that prejudice has ignored for expediency. Storytelling is the back door to empathy: being able to relate to another's story. Here, to relate is used in the sense of to retell the story by seeing oneself transposed as a character in that story.

The potential users go beyond original tellers:

• Development interests can shape their proposals to reflect the lived memories of locals.
• Immigrants can explore the nuances of their new communities with reduced language barriers.
• Political action groups can gather supporting narratives for or against a position.
• Elected representatives can understand the motivations of neighborhood inhabitants.
• Ecologists can use local stories to contextualize their research when impacted areas overlay local narratives.
• Urban resiliency is improved where living memories can be reimposed on the land after disasters such as fire, war, or floods.

Partners for Growth

To extend the reach of CHORUS, we propose integrating it as a research service into the following worldwide programs that manage access for researchers, provide database streamlining, and facilitate public and commercial procurement. The goal is to encourage adoption of CHORUS by researchers, the public, and urban change professionals.

CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure): Through a combination of access and advanced interoperable tools, researchers can use CLARIN infrastructure to explore, annotate, and combine other datasets with CHORUS data to support their work. The resources are hosted at 38 CLARIN centers—usually at universities or academic institutions—and connected via a central online portal (https://www.clarin.eu/).

eduGAIN interconnects research and education identity federations (be they universities or research institutes) around the world, simplifying access to content, services, and resources for the global research and education community. Once CHORUS is registered as a service with eduGAIN, it will be integrated with the trustworthy exchange of information and related to identity, authentication, and authorization (AAI) between other service providers, research and education institutions, or other identity providers. eduGAIN achieves this by coordinating elements of the federations’ technical infrastructure and providing a policy framework that controls this information exchange (https://edugain.org/).

The eduTEAM’s service supports multiple communities on the same platform and it is ideal for small- and medium-sized communities that want to get started with their virtual collaborations and take full advantage of federated access without having to deal with the complexity of operating and supporting their own authentication and authorization infrastructure. The eduTEAM’s service provides everything required in order to securely collaborate and use services available to the GEANT community and the European Open Science Cloud (https://eduteams.org/).

EUDAT’s vision is to share and preserve data across borders and disciplines. Achieving this vision means enabling data stewardship within and between European research communities through Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) - a common model and service infrastructure for managing data spanning all European research data centers and community data repositories (https://www.eudat.eu/). Researchers and practitioners from any research discipline can preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment, as part of the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure, which includes a network of cooperating centers to combine the richness of numerous generic and community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe’s largest scientific data centers. EUDAT offers heterogeneous research data management services and storage resources, supporting multiple research communities as well as individuals through a resilient network that is geographically distributed across 15 European nations. Data is securely stored alongside some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers.

Learntech Accelerator Network (LEA) is creating a network of public procurers in the educational domain to deploy personalized learning environment innovations in support of pre-commercial procurement (PCP) and public procurement of innovation (PPI) for research. LEA helps educational institutions procure the research services needed to adapt their own media archives to spatial archives compatible with CHORUS (https://www.learntechaccelerator.org/).

The spirit of Story City’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is to be a chorus.

Diversity:

Polis is the ancient Greek word for smoke ring: emblematic of a people standing in a ring to combine efforts. While our CHORUS is not by nature a polis, but a society, we endeavor to examine our individual prejudices together to limit their impact on the group. Everyone has a wealth of stories to share and their themes can enrich the work, so we value diversity as the creative life-blood that it is.

Equity:

The goal of a chorus is to empower a plurality of voices to rise together and to find harmony even with differences in timbre. The Story City platform was specifically designed to be equalizing technology, it is no-code and non-technical for the user, easily accessible via any web browser, and usable via some of the only technology many lower socio-economic groups have access to - via a mobile phone.

Inclusion:

As a team, we do not rely on the strength of any one individual. Strength will eventually fail, but power is derived from the team and is renewed with each new member. We are in the business of facilitating and composing new stories from the stands of old stories. To foster a sense of meaning in individuals’ work, their stories must be part and parcel of the result.

These three approaches are reflective of our mission approach with stakeholders: empower individual agency, seek continuity in competing stories, and transmute tragedy into comedy.

CHORUS will generate cash flow with paid-for versions of the app, through services provided to institutions (both grant and tender-based), and location-targeted advertising. A fourth revenue stream is locative fiction income split with content creators.

CHORUS provides a safe way to exercise civic agency at the local scale at a low cost to time and money. Our CHORUS narrative infrastructure adds the following values to the users and community:

• It improves the reach of an individual’s story to current and future initiatives, saving them time.

• It makes local sentiment easy to access by other entrepreneurs and developers who would like to have the local community as an ally in achieving their ambitions.

• It helps citizens of different backgrounds and languages to know each other as neighbors rather than as strangers.

We will offer access to the app with a sliding-scale fee based on organizational (likely governmental) funding. This offering will be mirrored to a corporate training offering that will also provide certificates of completion for continuing education units.

Additionally, a large organization, private funder, or government body can pay for a subscription to targeted areas, making use of the app free for their users for those areas. This will provide consistent cash flow.

These online learning modules will be largely automated, and limited in scale only by language. There is also potential advertising revenue from businesses that are colocated with the narratives (the approximate catchment of each narrative is 15 hectares, or two city blocks).

Expanding the usership of the app is easy to scale with the help of our student-learner offerings. As each learner group establishes a local CHORUS beachhead in their community, we will spend most of our staff resources to expand the adoption of that narrative infrastructure by local governments, NGOs, and development interests. Several municipalities have already adopted a Generative Building Code, and these will be the first we approach.

In markets where we have established a beachhead, CHORUS will operate along the lines of a public relations consultancy with the ability to pursue grants, tenders, and IDIQs independently or as part of a consortium.

In 2023, the global public relations market will be worth approximately 107 billion USD, up 6.6 percent from around 100.4 billion dollars a year earlier. The annual figure was projected to continue to grow in the following years at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.7 percent, thus surpassing 133 billion dollars by 2027.

Our fourth revenue stream is pay-walled fiction with proceeds split with the authors and artists. This is the model of the Story City platform, which has been running for eight years. The global location-based services market size grew from $70.27 billion in 2022 to $88.42 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 25.8%. The location-based services market size is expected to grow to $226.16 billion in 2027 at a CAGR of 26.5%.

The vision we hold is that our success leads to increased community mercantile revenue while empowering the sense of place for the community. This builds a feedback loop by satisfying peoples’ desire for a legitimate sense of meaning in their neighborhoods and allowing them to contribute and build that sense of meaning.

CHORUS uses an integrated approach: free-for-service, market intermediary, and organizational support. The civic engagement story map operates on a free-for-service model to facilitate community member agency. Revenue is realized through integration of mobile service offerings and for grant-based training services. Combined, CHORUS and Story City are a market intermediary, offering a creative media outlet for locative stories, art, and advertising space targeted to app users in situ. We also offer organizational support with professional services similar to a public relations firm to NGOs, corporate customers, and governmental agencies.

Our growth potential is similar to a social media company, such as Facebook, in that we help users curate both civic engagement stories and their creative works. Given the location data, we can easily identify potential advertising customers. Given the emphasis on boosting in-person shopping, we do not need user personal data beyond their geographic location.

Our growth plan is to invite foreign organizations to grant-fund the re-recording of the lessons in their local language and draft the app interface in their language. We have already been in contact with seven large publicly funded research support organizations that can provide the bulk services like access and storage for no cost.

As more narratives are added to each context by users, the potential impact of the app grows. Once archived, a narrative continues to be impactful in perpetuity. There are no wasted efforts. Unfortunately, the more impactful narrative infrastructure is, the greater the temptation for bad actors to debase it, which is the reason for applying open public ledger technologies.

Our creative users have already begun innovating:

• Some authors make their stories dynamic, so the reader's choice can change how the story unfolds.

• Gamification has been introduced by some authors to create elements of a digital scavenger hunt to move the narrative.

• Community groups have adapted our platform to record history tours of their neighborhoods.

Our principal expense, beyond labor, is server space. This cost comes down year after year, but we have identified partners in the research sector who are ready to improve our archive to a research-grade archive with full federated funding from the European Union.

Story City got off the ground with the Brisbane City Council Innovation Award, Australia, which granted initial project development funding.

Since then we have developed a variety of clients ranging from community groups to municipalities.

Our narrative infrastructure prototype was funded with a BAP-C grant from the Eastern Mediterranean University (Doğu Akdeniz Üniversitesi) in Famagusta, Cyprus.