Beyond clickbait and commerce

therefore, challenging to strike the right balance consistently across
this operating model. As The living community series Production
Manager put it:
One of the things we were really clear on is that we weren’t here
to tell their stories for them, but to provide a creative service
to enable them to tell their own stories. Which can be tricky,
because the moment you bring the camera out, people say: ‘Was
that okay, is that alright?’ And we say: ‘Yes, if that’s the way you
want to take it’ (Unitec Institute of Technology 2015a: 19).
Managing the dynamic complexity of multiple objectives,
constraints and people and delivering on the project’s commitment
to authentic community voice was enormously challenging. We
needed to consider how the stories would be best told within
the limits of our resources, and how each group wanted to – or
was equipped to – collaborate. Each of the seven contexts and
motivations was unique (see Table 1 below) as well as diverse in
form, membership and ways of working to achieve their objectives.
All, however, shared a commitment to building community
connections or resilience through their efforts.
RESEARCH
PAPER
The community groups/organisations
The living community team worked with the following community groups:
GROUP
CORE MOTIVATION
1 Violence Free Waitakere – Bully Banishing
Together: BBT is a community resilience
programme designed to take ‘a whole of
community approach to bullying’ (Violence Free
Waitakere, 2015) at family level, coordinating a
number of initiatives and collaborators around
anti-bullying and community capacity building.
‘Our aim is social change. To actually create
communities that are participatory and resilient.
And engaging and honouring the people who
are in them’ (Elaine Dyer, VFW CE, personal
communication, 21 August 2014).
Comment: The BBT documentary was initially intended to follow the story of a young man at the heart
of an anti-bullying drama workshop series. This proved too complex: the final piece (Clarke 2015b) was
structured around an interview with the CE of VFW, Elaine Dyer, and Geoff Bridgman, chair of the VFW
Board, with location material filmed during BBT community events.
2 CUE Haven is a 59-acre former dairy farm
being converted to native forest through extensive
planting undertaken by volunteer groups including
students. All types of volunteer effort, recorded in
the CUE Haven blog (CUE Haven 2015), helps this
project continue to meet its objectives.
‘…we have over two thousand volunteers. And
that to me is the story, to say that people can
come together and work … if you all put aside
your ego or whatever it is for a day and your daily
concerns … to be able to come to a space … and
then say “let’s work together and do something
which is going to outlast us”. To me, that is a story,
to say that people can achieve things [together]’
(Thomas Stazyk, personal communication, 27
August 2014).
Comment: A Unitec media class filmed interviews for The living community with Design students
showing their installed ‘way-finding’ work in situ (Clark 2015), as well as interviewing the owners.
Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016 53