Collect local stories
Like Terrastories, Mapeo is another powerful mapping tool stewarded by Digital Democracy. The easiest way to start collecting geolocations and referencing them to stories is by using Mapeo and the Mapeo Data Hub.
After syncing with the Hub, it automatically exports the observations of type Terrastories as a zip file, which can be imported into Terrastories as Places for stories.
documentation
Learn more
Terrastories is an application for communities to map, protect, and share stories about their land. It can be used by individuals or communities who want to connect audio or video content to places on a map. It is designed to be user-friendly and fun to interact with, allowing community members to freely explore without needing any technical background.
To get started with Terrastories we recommend reading the Terrastories: a tool for place-based storytelling guide written for the Earth Defenders Toolkit platform.
Community Story: Matawai
The Matawai of Suriname are using an open-source geostorytelling app called Terrastories to create an extraordinary repository of traditional knowledge through oral history storytelling. The goal of the work is to ensure that future generations of Matawai will be able to learn about their history, culture, and identity in the way that their people always have: through the words of the elders.
Starting a Project
Getting started with a community project can be very challenging, that's why we've prepared a How to Get Started guide that can assist and inspire your community with knowledge shared from experiences from other earth defender communities.
Community Mapping Project
Mapping tools are among the most powerful technologies for earth defenders. We recommend reading the guide on Mapping for Earth Defenders to gain basic knowledge on the importance of mapping and how your community can best make use of cartography.
Terrastories Documentation
Terrastories is very simple and intuitive, and we provide a collection of training and technical resources to support users of the application and community storytelling projects. Take a deeper dive into the possibilities of the application.
Contributing
Technical support
For help with common technical issues, see the section of this guide. For additional support, please check out the community of active users and maintainers of Terrastories on our public #terrastories channel on the Ruby for Good Slack.
If you're a developer or comfortable using GitHub, you can file an issue in the repository.
Online server access
Digital Democracy maintains an online Terrastories server at https://our.terrastories.app. If you would like to request a community account on our server, please write to us.
Support starting a Terrastories project
In addition to all of the resources compiled on the guides, there is a community of active users and maintainers of Terrastories that participate in our public chat channel on Discord and on our Earth Defenders Toolkit Forum. We encourage you to consult these spaces for additional tips and ideas on how people are using Terrastories.
Digital Democracy's core team is very small and we have limited capacity to provide direct accompaniment for implementing Terrastories outside of our existing partnerships. In some cases we are able to offer support. To read more about the way we work with partners and different levels of support, read our partner protocol.
