(Community-Made Video Text auf DEUTSCH.)

My humble business ‘Filmreif Beraten’ builds its future on the assumption, that Social Filmmaking will become a standard approach to emotionalize and shape corporate processes of any kind from within. By means of giving voice to the corporate crowd in strategic, transformative or educational processes all-alike.

Today any group of people can be synched into a collective productive effort to  produce a substantial 15 minutes movie in two days. Based on my mundane workflows equipment, conceptual inputs and feedback can be provided by a single consultant. The ubiquitous availability of home-made movies on virtually any subject (youtube, video-blogging) and the awareness for the power of the medium go a long way: People intuitively know how to frame stories in a form and fashion that is understood by their co-workers. They sense the difference between the risks of taking a stand in a workshop versus addressing a sensitive issue in a community-made movie. They enjoy the process of making up a juicy piece of living history. Because people sense a good stories potential for to bring about change.

In Organizational development (OD), learning is a characteristic of an adaptive organization. Community-Made Videos home in as a reply upon the commonly neglected question "what should we really adapt and act upon". The short answer is? One should act upon the stories that make up the living reality of all the people, whose job is to contribute to the reproduction of the focal system. This paper builds on the author’s professional expertise finding, that what constitutes a single loops’ learning content might best be de-pictured by means of living history captured on video -- from the community, for the community.

My experience indicates that video touches people in a different way than e.g. power point. A film sequence made up of a living history becomes part of the collective memory on a more commonly shared level, than say a remarkable event during an open space conference. From here on different takes and interpretations may gain visibility and deploy its potential for social change. Community-made videos have proven to be a strong enough container for to convey the message, without sustaining a loss. Video in consultancy processes is by no means new. A novelty is the availability of reliable, easy-to-use and relatively cheap equipment (camera, microphone, editing software & beamer).