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Pitch

Create and promote a multi-lingual video clip resource for news media documenting and dramatizing climate change impacts around the world


Description

Summary

Maximum Impact:

Leverage the influence of news media on society and political institutions worldwide by providing them with a resource to document and dramatize real-life impacts of climate change worldwide.

Exploit The Unique Character of MIT Alumni Community

MIT alumni are worldwide and technically facile.  Many are in positions of influence in media organizations.  Many are in Alumni Clubs that can be induced to compete or cooperate in gathering dramatic smartphone (or other) videos of climate change impacts on the environment (desertification, sea level rise, loss of flora and fauna, carbon pollution).  MIT alumni are also especially competent at providing technical interpretive texts and search terms for such video clips in an associated database that could be promoted as a resource to news media, politicians and others.

Program of Action

1.  Establish an interdisciplinary project at MIT to manage a program of datagathering from alumni (and others?) and promotion of the use of the climate change video database 

2.  Design an easily searchable and usable open video database resource and seed it with an initial load of documentary videos and texts covering climate change impacts.

3.  Communicate with alumni worldwide, via clubs, Technology Review, and letters or emails, to organize an initial contest and an ongoing program of contributions to the video database.

4.  Set up a volunteer wiki-like editorial group (via online connections worldwide) to quality-control contributions and their indexing, and to translate and create voice-overs for texts in multiple languages

5.  Promote the video database to news outlets, starting with identified alumni in those organizations.

6.  Work with WGBH to create an MIT Series on Climate Change as an occasional network-distributed TV or streaming program to identify MIT as a leader in this field.

This proposal would leverage the capabilities of MIT alumni help politicians worldwide get the popular support needed to take effective action.


What actions do you propose?

(This is covered in the Summary; details to be worked out with MIT faculty and staff if summary proposal is accepted.)