12 Dec ‘Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals’ white paper available now

Cambridge, Mass. (Dec. 12, 2022) — The MIT Open Documentary Lab’s (ODL) “Creating Community in Hybrid Festivals” white paper is now available on the ODL website. This white paper is the product of field research conducted online at IDFA DocLab 2021 and additional field-wide interviews in 2022.

Each year, ODL chooses a new research question to explore at IDFA as part of the festival’s DocLab Research & Development Program. In 2021, the focus was “how curators create meaningful connections between online and in-person festival goers, the artists and the work.” Through testing and observation of hybrid tools, seven interviews with members of the IDFA team, and 14 interviews with other immersive media and film curators, technologists and designers, our researchers were able to understand the value of hybrid festivals and synthesize the most common challenges faced by programming teams and their recommendations for the future.

To learn more, find the report here.

This report was funded by IDFA DocLab and ongoing support of the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the MIT Co-Creation Studio by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and JustFilms at Ford Foundation.