Getting rights right for participatory video

Turning the camera on the audience

An issue that comes up a lot in participatory video is rights, and in particular informed consent.  I suspect this is because both community development rights practices and media production practices are in play and these differ subtly under different jurisdictions and quite sharply from one another.

A lot of community development practice handles consent based on a research/medical type of practice, which assumes participants need to be protected from being identifiable unless they explicitly waive that right, based on good knowledge of what the consequences are.

In mainstream media practice, the situation is reversed - individuals are treated as authors of their contribution and need to be credited (their moral right to be identified as the originator of material within a film), unless they explicitly waive that right.  So in practice, to satisfy legal responsibilities as well as practice norms it means consent has to be fairly explicit.

This is then sometimes in tension with participation.  There are usually other norms of consent and ownership in play or several overlapping sets.  The way that rural Hungarians think about the ownership of a piece of music is quite different to the formal situation in terms of copyright, for example.  So dragging a group of participants through a consent procedure that doesn't work for them emotionally or in terms of their own understanding and practice is not a good way to set up a good spirit of sharing and participatory work.

As I understand it, InsightShare's practice is not to use consent forms, but rather to tailor what they're doing to each community they work with.  Overall they publish a set of working principles they adhere to, but the main focus is on the participants' understanding of what they're doing.

As for me, I think a good way of dealing with participatory rights for both research and for media production is to really stick to the idea of the facilitator's role as help a group produce their own film.  This might require some work on how a group shares responsibility and ownership, and it might take some work to illustrate and work through consequences (doing that well is where the facilitator's duty of care is discharged).  But instead of treating a group you're working with as assistants in making your film, which you can then take away and use as it's been signed off, the situation is reversed and the question is how to negotiate access to the group's film.

For example, as a researcher, exchanging your time and help in making a film for the group working towards a film they are happy to publish on a cc by basis removes some of the barriers to treating a film as research data.  You don't own it, you have access to it by a legitimate pathway, provided the group who own the film have given the OK for this.

Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation

I was just reading Arnsteins piece on the ladder of participation again and was struck at how far 'uses' of the ladder of participation have moved from her original idea, which was bound to time and place and rooted in civil rights work in the 20th C USA.
I'd spotted this before, but looking at the end of the piece the difference between her context and the project-bound notion of participation is why you get these contradictions all around when trying to climb the ladder of participation.

She says about citizen control:

Demands for community controlled schools, black control, and neighborhood control are on the increase. Though no one in the nation has absolute control, it is very important that the rhetoric not be confused with intent. People are simply demanding that degree of power (or control) which guarantees that participants or residents can govern a program or an institution, be in full charge of policy and managerial aspects, and be able to negotiate the conditions under which "outsiders" may change them.

A neighborhood corporation with no intermediaries between it and the source of funds is the model most frequently advocated. A small number of such experimental corporations are already producing goods and/or social services. Several others are reportedly in the development stage, and new models for control will undoubtedly emerge as the have-nots continue to press for greater degrees of power over their lives.

Though the bitter struggle for community control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools in New York City has aroused great fears in the headline reading public, less publicized experiments are demonstrating that the have-nots can indeed improve their lot by handling the entire job of planning, policy-making, and managing a program. Some are even demonstrating that they can do all this with just one arm because they are forced to use their other one to deal with a continuing barrage of local opposition triggered by the announcement that a federal grant has been given to a community group or an all black group.

It's about civic participation and a context which is about communities taking the right to participate in the face of much opposition.  A long way from projects which seek to draw communities into projects by 'offering' some power.