Cowbird is a free (and ad-free) platform for personal storytelling.

It consists of a community of storytellers, focused on a slower kind of self-expression than the frantic world of tweets and social networks. Stories allow us to untangle experience, make sense of our lives, and find meaning. They are containers for wisdom and lifeboats for memory — helping us not to forget, and then later, not to be forgotten.

Cowbird makes it easy for anyone to tell beautiful stories — incorporating text, photography, sound, maps, tags, timelines, characters, roles, and dedications, while automatically weaving these elements together.

Cowbird also pioneers a new form of participatory journalism, allowing people all over the world to collaborate in chronicling the overarching “sagas” that shape our lives today. Sagas are events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story — events like the Japanese earthquake, the war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Sagas not only occur in the news, but also in the hearts and minds and homes and heads of everyone alive. They are things we all experience, and things we all can feel, but they are big and loose and messy, so they’re hard to talk about and understand. Journalists, novelists, sociologists, and artists do their best to communicate sagas, but their accounts always suffer from the problem of a single perspective. The real story of a saga is the story of every single person involved in the saga, but it’s never been possible to tell that kind of story — until now.

Cowbird allows anyone alive to collaborate in chronicling sagas, giving shape to amorphous events, humanizing the news, and documenting history as it unfolds. As the mainstream media becomes increasingly out of touch with the chaotic, quickly changing, networked, and decentralized world of today, this personal and participatory approach could suggest a more resonant way of understanding our world and telling its stories.

Over time, we hope to build a kind of public library of human experience, containing the stories and memories of millions of people from all over the world, so that the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons.

It’s a big and earnest vision, and what we have today is something very small and humble, but we hope that you will join us, and that with your help, we may bring this vision to life.