The following is an excerpt from Marina Gorbis’ new book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World, coming out in April 2013 from Simon & Schuster. Published here with permission from the author.

Chapter 1: Putting the Social Back into Our Economy

Building a Collaborative Video Library of Human Experience

In 2002 David Evan Harris, like so many other college students, was spending his junior year abroad, traveling through Tanzania, India, the Philippines, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. In each of these places he lived with local families, sharing their intimate spaces and daily lives. He stayed in a bamboo house in the Philippines, a former squatter settlement in Mexico City, and a mansion in New Delhi. As with many young people having their first overseas adventure, the experience left an indelible mark on David. “I went from thinking of those countries as nations of abstract numbers of millions of people to thinking of them as individuals,”12 he says. Unlike many college students who return from abroad and go back to their regular lives, however, David parlayed his experience into a global social enterprise—part art project, part anthropological resource, part social movement.

The Global Lives Project is a collaboratively built video library of human life experience. For its first major undertaking, the Global Lives team captured twenty-four continuous hours in the lives of ten people in different parts of the world. How were the ten people selected? In the early 2000s, David saw an email asking what the world would look like if it had only one hundred people. Based on proportional distribution, only one person would have a computer, only one would have a college degree, thirty-three would not have access to clean drinking water, and so on. When reading the emails, David was struck by the contrast between what he was reading and the demographics of his social network, mostly college-educated middle class Americans. It inspired him to select ten people who would be representative of the global population.

For its first shoot, of James Bullock, a cable car operator in San Francisco, David’s collaborator was Daniel Jones of Kalamazoo, Michigan, someone David had met during his days as a climate change activist. Daniel had studied film and had gone on to get his first documentary production gig after college. The company he was working for went bankrupt, though, and instead of getting a severance paycheck he got a package of video production equipment. Daniel offered to fly to San Francisco to do the first shoot, and he and David split the cost of the airplane ticket plus gasoline and food expenses for the day. When the film was shot, Daniel edited it for the first DVD to be distributed to potential supporters. One of his friends, who worked at AOL at the time, created a website so they could show the film to people in other countries and invite them to participate.

The next shoot took a while to organize, as David moved to Brazil to do graduate study in sociology. Not far from his apartment he stumbled upon the Museum of the Person, a museum of people’s life stories, with more than seven thousand stories captured on video, ranging from stories of rural farmers to stories of most of the recent presidents of Brazil. One of the directors of the museum, Jose Santos, became David’s mentor and supporter, along with others on the museum’s staff. The Museum of the Person not only agreed to coproduce a second Global Lives shoot in Brazil; the staff also connected David with partners in Japan and the United States.

But Global Lives as a sustainable project did not become a reality until two other shoots took place, one in Malawi and one in Japan. David himself did not go to either of these locations, and this is where the model came together: self-organized teams of volunteers using the platform of Global Lives to create something independently that fits into the larger narrative of the project. Helio Ishii, a Japanese Brazilian filmmaker whom David had met through his university in Brazil, asked David if he could try to organize a shoot in Japan. So David emailed everyone he knew who had ever been to Japan and asked if anyone knew a filmmaker or a photographer there interested in social change. Remarkably he got twenty responses from people in Japan who wanted to help, including one at the United Nations University and one at Temple University’s Japan campus. Right around the same time, Jason Price, an American anthropology graduate student whom David had met briefly and who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi, offered to do a shoot in Malawi. So the two shoots happened without David’s on-site participation. The filmmakers were far more skilled than he was and had much better video equipment than he had. “All of a sudden, I was working with all of these people who were way out of my league and who were really interested in it and wanted to do it. At that point, I had my first sensation of, ‘Oh, my! It will really happen. We will get the ten done.’”

Since that time the Global Lives Collective has completed shoots in ten countries and has organized a number of exhibits around the world. Global Lives videos have been displayed as art installations in various museums, art spaces, and festivals, with footage of people’s lives around the globe playing simultaneously, inviting audiences to “confer close attention onto other worlds and simultaneously reflect upon their own.” The exhibits provide powerful immersive experiences for audiences, but what is equally instructive is how the videos themselves are created.

For its first three years of operation, the Global Lives Project had no paid staff.14 Instead, hundreds of volunteers from around the world, who make up the Global Lives Collective, organized themselves to create the videos. These volunteers include filmmakers, photographers, programmers, engineers, architects, designers, students, and scholars. Collectively they have donated thousands of hours to bring this project into being. Online volunteers have subtitled all 240 hours of footage and translated them into English and other languages.

Today Global Lives is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with a shared office and only one full-time staff member, but it has a huge network of contributors creating an amazing archive of human life experiences globally. With the motto “Step out of your world” and a mission “to collaboratively build a video library of human life experience that reshapes how we as both producers and viewers conceive of cultures, nations and people outside of our own communities,” the project continues to attract more and more eager contributors.