After getting community accord, we applied a schema of free, prior, fully-informed consent throughout the whole process, e.g. the young people, storytellers and all the participants follow respectful FPIC formulae and templates which have been developed by LCS.

In each work zone, a committee was formed, made up of both tribal elders and students, who would determine which community members would have access to the LCS digital technology when there is no prior LCS presence in the area. This fostered a sense of local ownership of the project, connected the two age groups together on a common mission, and ensured that the project was taken seriously.

The teaching of new skills is empowering. LCS attracts young people via a locally-customized training workshop on the use of new audio and video digital technologies, enabling them in this way to become ‘cultural agents’ to independently interview elders in their communities regarding traditional stories, songs and cultural practices.

We have trained more than 60 young students, all of whom volunteered for the program, in the use of a digital camera and digital recording devices to produce high quality results. A systematic way of working is essential too. Their training enables their explaining the LCS mission to elders, getting full consent, recording all the details of the storyteller and place etc. necessary to tag and properly annotate all recorded material. This, inter alia allows LCS to trace ownership and copyrights throughout subsequent content use and connect remote listeners later back with the original authors.

In 2007 alone in the first three mission zones, more than 275 raw stories were recorded.

Each student who participated in the LCS digital technology training and participated in field work, proudly received a diploma from LCS, which was presented at the local exhibitions in front of their entire community.

The LCS kit is the collection of digital audio and visual recording devices that story collection agents use when in the field, along battery chargers and a large external hard drive for all asset media storage.

Stored in a special wooden box, 3 kits were created for the Peru missions. The formality of having the equipment organized and delivered gave a sense of importance to the students collecting the stories. Additionally, the kit itself cultivated a sense of gravity and self-importance for the storytellers.

In total, 24 indigenous communities have actively participated in the project: 7 communities in the vicinity of the Tambobamba village, 6 communities around Urpay village, 8 communities near Ccatcca village, as well as the community of Pisaq.

More than 83 storytellers have participated, all of whom have been interviewed by community students who attended the LCS workshops. (This number does not take into account the number of storytellers interviewed in Pisaq.)

Activities to categorize and edit all the recorded material are essential: We are working to create online, dynamic, searchable classified collections of oral traditions that can be accessed and augmented by members of a culture, no matter what world context they find themselves in. This evolving digitized resource, which we call a ‘Storybase’, will help to ensure that these stories and traditions can be shared with a community's youth or heard by children anywhere on the globe, so they do not disappear and will be retold in the future.

We have created 4 local multimedia exhibitions directly in the Peruvian communities, mirroring the stories and recordings back to the rest of the community. These exhibitions have thus involved the larger population in the LCS mission, and created an opportunity, through the technology and systematic process developed by LCS, for members of the community to celebrate their own stories and heritage with pride.

They additionally record their reactions or reflections triggered by the work and cultural memories they see on display. The first LCS model exhibition in Tambobamba offered a questionnaire for attendees to fill out. One measure of the project's success is how many were returned—in the Tambobamba exhibition alone, over 220 questionnaires were filled out speaking of the positive impact.

Many students returned to their local exhibitions after school to spend more time listening to the stories they missed during their group visit. Often, a student would bring along his or her parents to enjoy the result.

The students shot thousands of photographs. This resulted in an extraordinary number of choices for each local community exhibition. As with the story collecting itself, the decisions as to which pictures would best accompany the best stories were selected by a editing group comprised of the local team, students and local authorities. On average we had around 25 photos selected and 20 stories picked to build each local exhibition.

The big exhibition at the Inca Museum in Cusco raised the profile of LCS from its initial local grass roots level to more of a regional entity. Entitled "Willanakuyninchis," a Quechua word for "our dialogue," the exhibition presented samples of the work created by the student members of the Quechua population who had participated in the LCS workshop in the communities of Urpay, Tambobamba and Ccatcca. The exhibition ran from June 15-30, 2008, as part of the 11th College of Ethnobiology, hosted by the Inka Museum and was exceedingly well attended.

More than 100 photographs were on display, as well as 16 MP3 sound boxes. Additionally, there was a video room where testimonials and documentation of the methodology were presented. The exhibition allowed LCS to debut its Touchscreen Talking Portraits and the Interactive Message Board. This dynamic multimedia device allows attendees to interact with the stories and indirectly with the storytellers, by allowing visitors to record and leave audio responses that will be posted online at a later date, and will also be made available as feedback to the original storytellers themselves.

We are excited by the many possibilities for synergy with local community radio and streamed digital broadcasts to extend the demographic of minority cultures involved in LCS-facilitated cultural dialogue and heritage sharing. In the Urpay community, radio programs were created and broadcast locally using the Radio Galaxia antenna, a local radio network around Cusco. This transmission is strong enough to be heard in all the surrounding communities involved. In many cases it could also be heard by farmers in the fields as they worked. Twenty different radio programs were created and broadcast, entitled "La Voz de los Andes" ("the Voice of the Andes"). Each was organized by the community itself and all of them were broadcast live, using 50% Quechua and 50% Spanish. We received enormous amounts of positive feedback after these broadcasts, and were also impressed by how many phone calls the station received during the actual broadcast.

We have succeeded in prototyping in Peru an innovative digital device: the voice message touchscreen. This communal device links the generations around their traditional stories in a multimedia exhibition context. It was also appreciated by the young and old as a way to strengthen the promotion of their minority culture and identity to outsiders. Linked with a computer "hidden" in the wooden structure, the touchscreen device enables a very special interaction with the digital storytellers. It created a strong enthusiasm during school visits - all the children wanted to have a go.

The ‘talking weaves’ from the Ccatcca community, are being used to explore new ways for adding value, meaning and significance to craftwork via its augmentation with digital storytelling. Traditionally a story, cultural meaning or record of the weaver's life can be woven into an object through the use of symbols, creating stories that live on within the object itself. LCS has commissioned three such woven pieces of craftwork and has recorded the makers’ accompanying stories and images, along with documentation.

Ccatcca weavers have produced 3 pieces, a traditional Andean hat which Adolfo is shown wearing here, a scarf and a woman’s scarf. These are just the beginning, to demonstrate many possibilities.

A major achievement for the Peruvian LCS team was the big "book" of stories gathered in the field by the LCS Tambobamba students. This book of more than 250 pages includes translations in Quechua and also in Spanish of the stories which they recorded themselves in the field during the first LCS Peru mission.

Schools have also been very active participants. In fact, we see LCS as providing an essential element of cultural education in what could become a national curriculum. The process we undertook in the methodology described above culminated with an exhibition event to share the photography and Quechua stories actually gathered by the local students. These exhibitions proved to be a good way to validate their own culture and reinforce pride in their cultural identity in the eyes of the other community members, especially because the materials were created by young people themselves. Every exhibition has therefore included classroom visits so many pupils can listen and react to the stories. Several teachers have taken this opportunity to create a special class around the exhibition to talk about their roots, to foster pride in their culture, and share the meaning of being Quechua.

Internet web logs (or ‘blogs’) are an effective and easy-to-learn way for community members to create their own online presence, and to reuse some of the images and audio recordings of storytellers they have collected. Blogs can empower community members to connect with dispersed other same-language communities across the world, to exchange content and experiences, and to promote their culture to the outside world. LCS Peru has held several blogging training workshops, and already, 3 Quechua communities in Cusco and Apurimac region have made their own blogs using the work done on the field. For one example see:http://tambobamba-lcsandes.blogspot.com (Tambobamba blog)

LCS has created Google Earth mapping illustrations of Peru mission, combining the work zones with greater detail of the project status on the ground. This serves several useful functions, for example: - It allows the students and local community members to put their project into a larger global context, showing them precisely where their community is on the globe and in relation to other LCS work zones. - It gives Quechua members living outside the prescribed work zones or perhaps now in cities an understanding of the precise locations of the LCS activities. The LCS Google Earth .kmz is available at: http://www.nicolasvillaume.com/BLOG_LCS/VoicesfromtheAndes_LCS2008.kmz