One Billion Stories is a documentary film exploring the impact of India's unprecedented expansion of network technology on the country's ability to collaborate around major social and environmental challenges. Our film will combine the stories of people currently exploring the potential of these technologies with perspectives on the societal implications of such a rapid growth of the Internet and mobile devices.

The goal is to make this film as collaborative as the topic it deals with. Along our journey through India we will invite Indian storytellers to help us shape our own narrative and capture the stories we find.

In the Fall of 2014 we traveled to India for the first phase of production on the film. We’re planning to return to India this fall to continue shooting and production, shortly after the completion of this crowdfunding campaign. We need your support to help us get back!

For more info on the project - see below and check out our pages:
One Billion Stories Website | Network Affect Website | Blog
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NETWORK AFFECT: OUR STORY

One Billion Stories was, itself, born out of online connections. For the first three months after deciding to do this documentary together, our whole team had never actually met in person. In fact, while Daniel and Will had lived together for a year in India, neither of us had ever met Alfred offline.

We connected with Alfred after seeing the trailer of his first documentary - Collaboration: On the Edge of a New Paradigm? The topic intrigued us both - how is the modern digital era affecting our ability to collaborate around big challenges in the fields of science and medicine? How are things like citizen science, hackerspaces, and open information transforming the ways we find solutions? What are the challenges they face?

We connected with Alfred online, and using skype and email collaborated across three continents to form the concept of our current project. We wanted to explore this modern notion of collaboration in a new place, one undergoing a large scale transition into the digital world, one where the need for solutions to large social and environmental challenges was urgent. For us there was no better setting for our exploration than India. 

INDIA’S “DIGITAL REVOLUTION”

It is the year 2019 and India has just achieved a staggering milestone: everyone in the nation of over 1.3 billion people has a mobile phone and a connection to the internet. This is the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Digital India” initiative. India currently has about 250 million people online, leaving 1 billion people to be connected within the next four years.

The scale of this is hard to fully grasp, let alone the speed at which they hope to accomplish it. Yet our interest is not in the question of whether this ambitious network expansion can be done, how long it will take, or how they will do it. We are interested in the implications of what this expansion means: How will the internet and mobile technology be used by this emergent population of 1 billion new users? As this network technology continues to grow in India, can it provide the tools and infrastructure to help cultivate the type of deep collaboration necessary to face the diversity of key social and environmental challenges facing the country?

These are the questions we set out to explore as we traveled across India over the course of six weeks in the fall of 2014.  We traversed the country speaking with scholars, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, educators,  students, artists, and community builders. Now we're preparing to return to India this fall, to continue the journey and find the stories emerging from this unprecedented technological expansion...

INDIA AND BEYOND - THE BIG PICTURE

If India succeeds at bringing its entire population online, it will become the largest internet user base in the world. Because the internet is shaped by the ways people use it, this means that the future of the internet itself may lie in India’s hands. Questions surrounding net neutrality and the open access to information, two topics with a large impact on the internet as a tool for collaboration, may be answered in India.

Introducing the Internet to billions of people who have never before experienced it will have other implications, in terms of what will happen to the cultures and knowledge currently embedded within these communities. The proliferation of the Internet provides an opportunity for these cultures to thrive and for the knowledge they carry to spread globally, while simultaneously threatening their very existence by being filtered out by the more contemporary and mainstream information already flooding the online world.

One Billion Stories seeks to explore these fascinating intersections between modernity, tradition, culture, knowledge, information and technology in the hopes of providing compelling insights relevant to the growth of network technology around the world.