Life Stories collabs

Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations is an oral history project exploring Montrealers’ experiences and memories of mass violence and displacement. A team of university and community-based researchers are in the process of recording life story interviews with more than 500 Montreal residents over the course of five years and are sharing their work on the stie. This site launched in early 2007 was, in my opinion, the first "big" site I had the opportunity to build. Working with designer Pata Macedo, I learned a lot about collaboration. While the project was funded by the department of Oral History and Storytelling at Concordia University, it involved the participation of seven community groups, each having their own input on the project. While it's said that too many chefs will spoil the soup, in this case we were able to build a single site where each group could represent themselves individually in their respective sections. Unlike most websites built with a content management system, this site does not have the same aesthetic throughout, allowing each of the groups to have their own look and feel while staying within the boundaries of the layout.