A community portal is an emergent phenomenon. A portal is comprised of a series of tools and information resources for a community of users to ‘build’ a communications structure around a specific theme or area of interest or concern. In this instance Aboriginal Early Childhood Development with a strong focus on literacy. What is powerful about this phenomenon is that the structure is self-organizing and over time will build itself, taking its form from the community’s own input and involvement.

The “A is for Aboriginal” project team will build the portal structure and install numerous tools and services that can be used by anyone who has basic word processing skills. There is no programming required once the structure has been built.

The Story Portal will promote story telling, both the creation of new stories as well as the sharing of traditional and personal family stories with other members of the community.

How will this work?

There will be an interactive story telling section using both wikis and blogs*** . These two ‘funny sounding’ words are two Internet phenomena that have entered the mainstream and what is useful about these two communication tools is that they are very easy to learn and work with and, more importantly, they promote new forms of collaboration and creative exchange. To see one of the best examples in the world, an open collaboration encyclopedia that is an emergent ‘phenom’, go to wikipedia and in relation to this project here is what you find in the ‘wikipedia’ on First Nations.

Never before has the world been able to ‘build’ anything like a ‘free encyclopedia’ and the phenomenal growth (emergence) attests to the ‘quantum leap’ that this new technological innovation offers the world. This phenomenon grows through a self-organizing principle The “A is for Aboriginal” Project will, we believe, take on a life of its own and can grow into something of real consequence for Aboriginal literacy in particular and children’s literature in general. The goal is that the Story Portal will become a repository of traditional Aboriginal children’s stories as well as an incubator for aspiring children’s authors, storytellers and artists.

What are some of the tools and services that will be included in The Story Portal?
There will be a number of tools including newsletters, discussion forums, polling, a search engine, photo and art galleries and more. A primary component is the collaborative story telling area where writers and readers alike can share their story ideas and have the community give their feedback on what comes out of the experience.

The Story Portal can bring a vital energy to the whole area of early childhood literacy. Every mother has her own ‘little stories and songs’ that come to them in those precious years of a child’s infancy. A Story Portal can build on that by opening up that experience to other young mothers, family members, elders and like-minded people in the community.

Aspiring authors and storytellers will have the option to open their writing to collaboration or not depending on their own choice. They can simply present and share their stories on their own private area and on one of the public story forums and ask for feedback or not. Again it is up to the individual.

A powerful feature of the portal structure is that it is infinitely extensible. Every single user can have their own home page and personal section within the Story Portal Anyone can join the community of users for free.

Another powerful feature is that the Story Portal can act as a virtual ‘marriage broker’ for authors, illustrators and even publishers. Writers looking for illustrators or illustrators looking for cover design or character design work can meet through the portal and even download standard layout templates for children’s hard cover and paperback editions to build pre-press versions of their collaborations.

The site will also have multimedia capabilities that will include animated flash stories, short digital children’s video, voice-overs and story narrations and musical accompaniment. There will be a special children’s song section. Something along the lines of a ‘submit a lullaby’ or children’s song area with a community feedback component. Rate this song.

* "Any software whose code is available for users to look at and modify freely. Linux is the best-known example; others include Apache, the dominant software for servers that dish out web pages.”
** Zope/Plone is a specific open source content management framework/system used by NASA, the States of Texas and Hawaii, major airlines and many others. We chose this platform as it is both robust and free.
*** Wiki (means quick in Hawaiian) is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has simple text syntax for creating new pages and cross-links between internal pages on the fly. A Blog is an online journal and blogging is the act of maintaining a chronological flow of personal journal entries and relevant links.