It is widely assumed that the Internet is a global information resource. This is not true. For many people in the poorest parts of the world, the Internet is both technically and psychologically inaccessible through lack of infrastructure, money, and the requisite forms of textual and computer literacy. The StoryBank project has been tackling some of these issues by using the fast-growing infrastructure of mobile telephony to support an alternative form of information sharing in pictures and sound.

Situated in the Indian village of Budikote and inspired by developments in audiophotography and mobile imaging, we have been exploring the possibility of semiliterate communities using the camera phone as a new kind of pen and paper for creating and sharing audio-visual stories. The system design has been described in a recent conference paper, and we are currently preparing a full write-up of the trial results. Here we want to promote the simple story format arrived at in the research, and point to some of the interaction design challenges of supporting it in this context.