What if a country could write it's own history?

Lead Artists: Yasmin Elayat, Jigar Mehta

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18DaysInEgypt is a collaborative web-documentary about the ongoing Egyptian revolution. The project is supported by the Tribeca New Media Fund grant and Ford Foundation, was selected by the Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab, received an Honorary Mention in the Digital Communities Category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2012, and named one the Moments of Innovation in Participatory Documentary by MIT Open Documentary Lab & IDFA DocLab

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During the first 18 days of the Egyptian revolution, Egyptians were documenting one of the most important historical movements in their countries’ history through tweets, photos and thousands and thousands of hours of video. The world was witness to the frontlines of history in the making.

18DaysinEgypt is a collaborative web-documentary about the ongoing Egyptian revolution which calls on the community to tell their story of the ongoing revolution using their own media such as their photos, videos, tweets Facebook posts – creating a living history project written by the people.

The website launched on January 19th, 2012 and collected over 1,000 stories from the community and from our team of on-the-ground fellows who bridge the digital divide in Egypt to collect stories from the “offline” Egyptian community.

18DaysInEgypt is an ongoing project collaboratively documenting a living history of an ongoing revolution by those who are there. If journalism is the “rough draft of history,” 18DaysInEgypt is a “raw draft of history” of a story that’s still in the making.

The project led to the establishment of a citizen journalism incubation program called The Egypt Journalism Project in 2013.

Credits

Co-Creators: Yasmin Elayat, Jigar Mehta 

Technology Partners: Emerge Technology

Community Managers: Shadi Rahimi, Carmel Delshad

 

18DaysInEgypt Fellows

Sara Farag Elkamel, Mostafa Sheshtawy, Mohamed Abd El-Hamid, Nesma El Shazly, Dina Fergani, Menna Awad, Ahmed ElShamy, Ethar Hassan, Nina Awad, Karim Magdy

 

Additional Support: Hugo Soskin, Janessa Karwan

Additional Design: Caroline Oh

Meet the team

Community building is key to any crowdsourced projects. To ensure 18DaysinEgypt was inclusive we had to overcome the digital divide in Cairo which only had 20% internet penetration, we built a community outreach team of journalists and citizen-journalists that we called the !8DaysinEgypt fellows. Not only did our team bridge the digital divide by interviewing street vendors, farmers, taxi drivers and others who wouldn’t have access to the platform.

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Honorary Mention Digital Communities

Prix Ars Electronica

2012

Moments of Innovation in Participatory Documentary

MIT Open Documentary Lab & IDFA DocLab

2012

New Frontier Lab

Prix Ars Electronica

2011

New Media Fund

Tribeca and Ford Foundation

2011

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