How to create an online community around your participants?

The ADFI team I work with at USQ has been working on The Fascinator software and a project that I’ve been really interested in has been around working with a public memory researcher who’s been looking at a particular battle held during the Vietnam War. The researcher has a great relationship with many of these men and their families and they often supply her with photos, documents and other materials to accompany her interviews and the documentary she’s working on. The research become a part of the veteran community and her data and work is more that research – it’s a chance for the community to share its story.

We’ve been working to develop the software so that the research participants can connect with each other and the researcher by providing comments, tags and annotations on various materials such as photos. We allow photos to be tagged in a Linked Data manner that identifies people via their Nominal Roll entry as well as provide location information via GeoNames.