At a certain point in the progress of the NFB's history of Canada Web site, Explore Canadian History on Line (ECHO), there was a need to come at the project a fresh. The ECHO prototype had been made and there was a lot of discussion about what was there and what was missing.

While things were being sorted out, the producers asked a small team to propose a new structure for the site taking into consideration some rather innovative perameters. The team was made up of Marc Pitre, media content researcher, Kevin Kee, historian and content manager, and myself.

The perameters were born of the notion that everyone's reading of history changes depending on their perspective. Take the Oka crisis, the 1990 stand off between the Mohawk people, Quebec police and the Canadian army over a scared piece of land that was to be made into a golf course. It all depends whether you were behind the baracades protecting your land, looking forward to having a game or two next season, watching it TV or setting government policy. This post-modern view of history was at the cutting edge of historical thought at the time.

The NFB's ambition for its Web site was to apply mutiple perspectives to a text that told the story of Canada from prehistory to the present. This was an amazing idea. We proposed a solid schematic for the new history site which encorporated these ideas. It was a dynamic web of interrelated nodes of content that could be organised and customised according to different filters or lenses

Unfortunately, as with the ECHO prototype, circumstances conspired to stop this work just as it was taking off. However, all was not lost. Kevin Kee went on to produce a highly innovative youth site on the War Measures Act. This site targeted at a youth audience presents instances of the Canadian government suspending civil liberties and gives voice to both those who were responsible for the implementation and those who were victim of it, as well as presenting a ficticous scenario in which users much decide whether to evoke the WMA. It will be launched as part of the upcoming NFB critical thinking site.

When I have a minute I'm going to put up some architecture schematics here that were produced for the NFB History Site Redesign.