Free Community Building Through Flickr's Photo Sharing
I went to the Ottawa Folk Festival last weekend and had a great time watching some amazing performances and meeting lots of wonderful people. Like many successful festivals it is filled with people who make this a regular event and where one can see people in your community that you don't always run into.
One of the first people that I ran into was Jake Morison who was one of the volunteer photographers for the event. Jake's a good photographer, but it was amazing to see how much photography gear many people at the festival had. Over the course of the three days there must have been hundreds of thousands of photos taken by the official photographers, media, artists, but mostly by the thousands of people who attended this festival.
With all of the digital cameras around it is a real lost opportunity not to be encouraging folks to share them by tagging their photos, videos & blog posts with ottawafolkfestival or ottawafolk. It's a nice way to build community online, and festivals are all about community & great memories. Like with the Facebook groups that was set up, it is free to set this up and encourage people to participate. Unlike Facebook though the Flickr interface allows users much more control over the rights to their pictures (especially allowing people to select a Creative Commons license).
