Stories are the new data according to Russell Brown, David Slack and Mark Cubey, who at Kiwi Foo Camp, New Zealand’s invitation-only geek-fest last weekend, made a call for more grassroots participation in attempts to preserve New Zealand’s cultural identity.

Although I didn’t make the exclusive Foo flock, Rod Drury, Don Christie and Mauricio Freitas were there and blogged the session. (Just quietly, why couldn’t a bunch of uber-geeks manage to podcast a session or two?)

Anyway, Russ compared New Zealand’s gated online encyclopaedia, Te Ara, to the more participatory Wikipedia and found Te Ara wanting… wanting user-generated content.

To be fair, Te Ara has solicited community involvement, but this has been on their terms. Back in June we suggested Te Ara use digital storytelling to solve David’s dilemma and “help people tell their own stories in an authentic voice“, because, as Russ et al. suggest, telling stories is the way we keep our culture alive.

(We couldn’t wait for Te Ara, so we helped Graham tell his story.)