Do you want to share your experiences in other cultures with a larger audience but cannot afford to spend time to maintain a site of your own?
Do you have interesting stories and observations related to foreign lands?

Let’s collaborate. You can start by filling the Survey and telling about yourself.

Inspiration for CommonColors Project

Living to Tell the Tale (Vivir para contarla in Spanish, “Anlatmak İçin Yaşamak” in Turkish) is the first volume of the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez, one of my favorite authors. For last 2 years or so I have been doing exactly that. I am trying tell about the Japanese culture to a limited audience in Turkish. I like writing about Japanese habits, traditions, details of life in cities, etc. In return I enjoy getting curious remarks from my audience, as they show that my effort was not wasted.

There are lots of people out there who are interested in foreign cultures as much as I do.

Vision for CommonColors Project

We can work together to build a collection of our tales about other cultures. Tales of what we observe and/or experience for the global audiance.

The vision of CommonColors Project is to create a collection of short memoirs - textual, visual or audio - in cyberspace that describe or observe some aspect of a culture. The content should not only address what is observed, but should also add author's own impressions that should be enriched by social, historical or philosophical background details.

Having said that, I want to emphasize that culture is a broad concept and its definition is far from being agreed upon. The term I will refer in this site is more in anthropological sense, and is defined by Unesco (quoted from Wikipedia) as "culture should be regarded as the set of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features of society or a social group, and that it encompasses, in addition to art and literature, lifestyles, ways of living together, value systems, traditions and beliefs."

Sounds like another Web 2.0 scheme? Well, yes, but it depends on what is delivered and how.

Profile of collaborators

The collaborators of Commoncolors Project should be like a "culture sponge": when they visit another land, they try to understand the local culture, they live it, and take one or more things from it with them when the experience is over.

Another condition I am contemplating is that the participants should be "foreigners". They should not be the natives of the culture they are telling about. The reason for this restriction is that, in my view, there is not much value if one tells about his/her own culture. First of all there are lots of such sites. In addition, nationalism, and cultural bias will cloud the stories, thus reduce the benefit to the audiance. Only exception can be the natives who speak one of the "Endangered Languages". In practice it will be tough to find foreigners who can reflect and tell about these anyway.

Implementation plan

First I want to collect suitable participants. I am hoping that people will be willing to provide information by filling the survey questions. My target is to start accepting their contributions as early as possible. Depending on the feedback I receive I will create a site structure. The most basic structure would be to run a multiple-user blog and ask people to tag their contributions. I need to find a way to create and maintain tags to create meaningful categories for audience to find things as effectively as possible. The collection can be in the form of blogs, foto albums, podcasts, video clips etc.

Commercialization

Eventually, it will be nice to have some kind of an income to cover the expenses. Easiest and fastest way would be to accept ads. When the number of participants increase and content gets richer, I would like to shift to a more commercial model and go beyond advertisement to charge for the content or uses of content.