Oakland, CA, is fortunate to have The Organic City, a thesis project created by the combined efforts of Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern, students in CSU East Bay’s Multimedia Graduate Program.
The Organic City seeks to connect with the community through its website where visitors can find and tell stories about local places. In addition, the project offers mobile media that can be experienced onsite with mobile media players and Pocket PC’s.
The project’s goal is to facilitate exploration of the “relationships between place, story, and community; as well as the ways in which new technologies can enhance our appreciation for these important components of human identity and experience.”
The site offers several ways for visitors to find stories (such as by author or by geographical area in which the story is based), as well as Story Tours that enable users ton download stories onto a mobile device and play them while in the area in which the stories take place. Visitors can also tell their stories on the site.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if all cities and towns undertook a project like this?
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Place based storytelling has been growing for a number of years. Check out the Center for Digital Storytelling's place based projects at:
http://www.storymapping.org/projects.html
(They have a podcast too).
The first project I heard about was Murmur, in Toronto. (http://murmurtoronto.ca/ ). Since 2003, they've been creating local walks where you can hear local stories and oral histories from local inhabitants via your cell phone. The Murmur project has inspired similar projects ever since.