What’s A Developing Story all about?

We bring together stories from the developing world to help raise awareness and highlight issues. We’re also interested in the importance of new media literacy, Creative Commons and user generated content, amongst other things. There’s more detail on this page about the aims of A Developing Story.

Who are you?

The site was founded by Benjamin, John and Phil, but there are lots of other people who contribute and help out. You can find out more here if you want to become involved.

Can I write for you?

We’re always looking for new contributing editors with a fresh perspective on international development. If you’d like to write for us, or you just want to send us a link to content you think we should include on the site, then you can contact us here.

What kind of pictures do you want?

We’re interested in stories, not technically perfect pictures or video (though we like them, too). If the picture tells a good story, then it doesn’t matter if it’s taken on a camera phone or a Hasselblad.

Will you pay for use of my pictures?

We’re a not-for-profit site, and we want to encourage the use of Creative Commons licenses in development communication work, to help spread messages further and faster, so we don’t pay for any content featured on the site.

What rights to my pictures do you want?

We don’t want any, we just want to act as a showcase. We’d like to encourage users to upload pictures or video to Flickr using a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution non-derivative license. If you then sell rights to these pictures we don’t want anything from you. You retain all rights to your pictures. You only grant us the right to publish as much or as little of your work on the site as you see fit. This blog post about Creative Commons explains more about our approach.

We also believe that agencies working in international development should create more content to tell their stories more effectively, old-fashioned advertising campaigns are becoming much less effective, quality content is the best way to engage audiences on the web, and we think it makes sense to make these messages as open and speadable as possible.

How do I get my pictures on the site?

There are several different ways we can display photos, including the big picture blog and rolling Flickr sets on the frontpage. We’ll happily publish one picture in isolation, if it’s strong enough. For photosets, it’s best if they contain fewer, better pictures which tell some sort of coherent story. The best thing to do is contact us and discuss what might be best.

What about film and video?

The more the merrier. We don’t host any film ourselves, so upload it to YouTube, Vimeo, etc, point us to the link, and we’ll do the rest.

Someone is infringing my copyright, what can I do?

We make every effort to ensure that all rights are respected, however, because we use services such as Flickr and YouTube over which we have no control, we can never be entirely sure that all published material isn’t infringing someone else’s rights. If you believe that your copyright is being infringed then mail us at:

adevelopingstory [{ @ }] googlemail [{ . }] com   (removing the brackets and space)

with details of the infringed rights, and proof of your ownership.

How do I get a picture beside my comments?

A Developing Story supports Gravatars (globally recognised avatars). You upload one picture and you can use it on most blog sites, as long as you log in with the same email address you used for the gravatar.