The digital storytelling movement emerged from the odd cross section of community-based arts making, avant garde aesthetics, and digital media. The notion of story, and a very, very specific idea about the democratization of voice in the digital era, informed all aspects of the effort. Practitioners would use the educational process of media technology training to create a mechanism for enabling people whose stories were not being heard to make those stories visible. 
That movement, having grown to thousands and thousands of supporters around the planet, gathers again next week in Massachusetts, at the Voices of Change conference. We will celebrate the enormous growth and diversity of this work with presentations from nearly 160 practitioners, researchers, organizers, and creatives, from 20 countries.

That movement, having grown to thousands and thousands of practitioners around the planet, gathers again next week in Massachusetts at the Voices of Change conference, and we will celebrate the enormous growth and diversity of this work with presentations of nearly 160 practitioners, researchers, organizers, and creatives from 20 countries.  

At StoryCenter we have a creation myth. For the first ten years, as often as not I would lead off my initial lecture about our work by showing a single story from the very first Digital Storytelling workshop . . . The story was by Monte Hallis. I can’t say I remember much… A smart, focused woman among a group of seven participants. She was going through a major change taking care of her friend Tanya Shaw, a young mother of two girls who was dying of AIDS at a local hospice center. Dana asked Monte to make it personal. She did. The rest is the story/history of our organization.