« Previous—Next »

Using a story-bank to manage your stories

You collect stories; you tell stories; you use stories, in many different ways, in your family, your community, your business.

But how do you manage those stories? How do you record them, keep track of them, link them, assess their meaning, veracity and value? How do you ensure that the right story is used in the right place at the right time? How do you ensure that you have the stories that you need, in making sense, in bringing people together, in connecting past and future?

There’s a lot more to story than just the stories themselves – and it’s in managing these everyday story-tasks that a purpose-built story-bank such as Zahmoo really does demonstrate its value.

To illustrate this, let’s say that you’re making a short documentary to tell some part of your family’s, community’s or business’s story – something that would typically link together a whole swathe of smaller stories to tell that larger story. During the development-phase, you’d often expect to see something like this: a wall covered with sticky-notes that summarise story-fragments, organised into story-like sequences.

That’s the surface part of story that everyone can see. It all looks good, it all looks easy, and it might even seem that there’s nothing more to story-management than that. And that might actually be true if there’s only one or two people involved, if it’s all coming straight out of people’s heads at that time alone, and if it can all be completed before the sticky-notes start falling off the wall – which is a lot of ‘ifs’… Reality is that for anything larger than what can be seen on that wall, you’re going to need a more systematic way to manage your stories!

Which is where Zahmoo would come into the story. For example, a Zahmoo story-bank can help you with all of these story-management tasks:

• set up and manage access to your story-bank
• assist in the practical logistics of story-capture
• capture and keep track of stories in text, audio or video
• automate a ‘mass-capture’ to collect stories from many people, maybe spread out in location and in time
• confirm and fact-check your collected stories
• use tags and links to connect between related stories
• merge different people’s related stories into fictional yet ‘real’ personas
• use additional metadata to keep track of the context and use of each story

Such story-management tasks remain much the same regardless of the scale of the story – family, community or business. In fact, what matters here is that they are handled in a consistent way, regardless of scale – and, of course, that the story-bank does handle all of those tasks. And that’s what Zahmoo does.

So whatever type of story-work you’re doing, use a Zahmoo story-bank to help you manage your stories, because it’ll free you to concentrate more on what really does matter most: the power of the story itself.

—
Image credits: 024 by virtueel_platform under a Creative Commons BY-SA-2.0 licence; ‘Story-wall’ for Walking Merchandise by Rob Nguyen under a Creative Commons BY-SA-2.0 licence.

Comments are closed.